Sometimes I cannot look away and I cannot resist taking up my camera to make a photograph. On a January day in 2020 this man crossed in front of my car. I saw a Sisyphus character laboring under the weight of all his possessions.
I think a moment like this touches me deeply because I can see myself in this person. I see a brotherhood of man in these moments and know that out of my own family I am the only one of my siblings not to experience homelessness.
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” ~ Albert Camu
I cannot help but think of the myth of Sisyphus and the intense reality that we are all just passing time moving through space. We are attempting to find meaning and purpose along the way. I do not know this person’s story but I am grateful for the way in which it compels me to want to ask and want to act, and to move through my world with just a little more humaneness, empathy, and gratitude.
I thought of this image again last night as I read a letter written by Ranier Maria Rilke that starts:
Oh, Lou, I have tormented myself like this day after day. For I understood all those people, and though I detoured around them in a wide arc, they had no secret from me. I was wrenched out of myself into their lives, right through all their lives, all their heavy laden lives. I often had to say to myself out loud, “I am not one of them, eventually I am going to leave this horrible city where they weill die”, I said it to myself and felt that there was no deception in it. And yet when I noticed how my clothes were becoming dirtier and heavier from week to week and saw how they had become frayed in many places, I grew frightened… Wasn’t I really one of them… Wasn’t I actually homeless, despite the semblance of a room in which I was as much a stranger as if I had been sharing it with someone totally unknown? Didn’t I go hungry just like them… And wasn’t I ostracized just like them?… Wehn they laughed, it sounded as if something were falling inside them, falling and smashing to bits and filling them up with shattered fragments. They were not funny but deep; and their depth reached out for me like a force of gravity and drew me down toward the center of their misery.
