A monument is one generation’s decision about what later generations should look up to.

Monuments are statements about the future more than about the past. Someone decided what a person walking by in a hundred years should regard as admirable, and cast it in something durable so the decision would be hard to revisit. The permanence is the argument. It says this judgment should not have to be made again.

When you pass one, ask who built it, when, and what they were trying to settle. And notice what your own time is building permanently, because it is making the same kind of claim on people not yet born. Durability is a way of removing something from discussion.