Local Date

23 May 2024

Local Time

21:21

Location

Friedhof Hernals (Hernals Cemetery), Wien

Country or Territory

Austria

Name

Soph Dyer

Satellite

NOAA-19

Radio Callsign

M6NYX

Archive ID

ow391

Again, my phone's weather app says that it will rain, but the day turns out fine. I doubt the algorithm's ability to account for the dramatic effect of the Alps on Vienna's weather. There can be huge thunderstorms only a couple hundred kilometres South, and Vienna will be basking in sunshine. My day, too, defies my expectations. I woke early, rough, the swelling in eye gone down but the pain in my side throbbing. Yet work was good and afterwards I cycle to an outdoor pool, then indulged in sushi at a neighbourhood restaurant with N. I received this image from a hilltop cemetery. In the silence afterwards, stood on a path between the flickering of red lamps of graves, I feel time thicken. I am reminded of how Libyan author Hisham Matar, when stood at a cemetery's edge, asks "What is it to remember the dead?" For Matar, "the scale is unfathomable". It is "[d]eath’s endless appetite", he writes. "The deceased outnumber the living by such a scale that the present suddenly seemed to me to be the golden rim of a cloth". (Matar 2019)

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