Who Cares?

Poet Robert Hedin does an excellent job of exploring the theme of carelessness in his work "This Morning I Could Do a Thousand Things" just like the way Albert Camus interweaves the same theme into The Stranger. Hedin's poem discusses the many opportunities the narrator could grasp in the morning, but instead shows that jumping at those opportunities aren’t worth it and decides "...to just lie/Here in this old hammock"(Hedin, lines 16-17). His resulting action hints towards negligence of the situation. Just as "This Morning I Could Do a Thousand Things" presents the idea of living the moments as they come, The Stranger also starts to explore the same matter in the first chapter. The narrator, Meursault shows very little, if not any, attachment towards his mother, whose body lies still in the coffin.  Meursault expresses no feelings towards his mother's death which is explicitly shown when he said "...I offered the caretaker a cigarette and we smoked" (Camus, pg. 31). Though the poem and the story do not revolve around a similar occasion or even have anything literal in common, both works of literature talk about the carelessness of the narrators.