Today, we supposedly had the hottest day ever recorded in Austria.
It was hot.
It still is.
The entire city feels baked. The buildings have absorbed the heat and are now generously giving it back. The streets are radiating it. The air is heavy. Even now, at night, there is nowhere for it to go.
So perhaps we have survived hell.
Or perhaps this was simply another summer day.
I went grocery shopping earlier. Just the usual local supermarket. There weren’t many people around, which meant there was actually time to talk to people while the cashier scanned the groceries.
I told him that we had hotter days.
I still have the headlines in my head.
I remember summers when the heat seemed every bit as oppressive as this. Perhaps the numbers were different. Perhaps they weren’t. But I remember being hot.
And that is the problem with temperature records.
When you are standing there sweating, when the pavement is radiating heat back at you, when your shirt sticks to your body and you are wondering whether the night will bring any relief, the heat of the past is not really a memory anymore.
The heat of today is all that matters.
A single degree less doesn’t matter.
It certainly doesn’t feel like it matters.
I told the cashier that I remembered days in my youth, half a century ago, when it was so hot that parts of the road actually softened.
And suddenly an older lady standing nearby turned around.
She told me that no roads had ever softened.
I was making it up.
Apparently.
It was said with the certainty of someone correcting a child who had just claimed that the moon was made of cheese.
I wasn’t particularly interested in arguing.
But then an even older gentleman standing behind me in the queue joined the conversation.
He said he remembered summers in Burgenland.
And yes, he remembered roads having problems when it was very hot.
He remembered the track marks.
And there it was.
Two memories.
Two people.
Two entirely different relationships with the past.
One had apparently been erased by the present.
The other was still there.
And there is something about that little exchange that bothers me considerably more than today’s temperature.
Because we have become extraordinarily good at replacing memory with narrative.
The older lady wasn’t necessarily lying. She probably genuinely remembered it that way.
That is precisely the problem.
Memory is fragile.
It changes. It gets edited. It absorbs the stories we hear afterwards. Eventually we don’t necessarily remember what happened. We remember what we have been told happened.
And that applies to almost everything.
Including the weather.
There is a strange temptation, whenever we experience an extreme event, to assume that we are experiencing something unprecedented.
Perhaps we are.
But the emotional experience of unprecedented is considerably easier to manufacture than the actual historical fact.
It is hot today.
Very hot.
The city feels like an oven.
That is a fact I don’t need a thermometer to establish.
Whether it is the hottest day Austria has ever experienced is a different question.
That requires records.
And records are useful.
They matter.
Numbers matter.
Historical measurements matter.
We should absolutely know what is happening to the climate, and we should absolutely take changes in temperature seriously.
But there is another kind of evidence that we have become increasingly uncomfortable with.
Human memory.
Not because memory is always right.
It isn’t.
Far from it.
But because memories are messy, contradictory and inconvenient.
They don’t necessarily fit neatly into the story we are currently telling ourselves.
And that makes them dangerous.
I remember those roads.
Perhaps I remember them imperfectly.
Perhaps the roads didn’t soften quite as dramatically as my childhood memory tells me.
Perhaps it was only particular types of road surface. Perhaps the formulation of the asphalt was different. Perhaps the roads were simply less robust than they are today.
And then the older gentleman remembered the same phenomenon.
He remembered the track marks.
He remembered the heat.
He remembered roads behaving differently.
That doesn’t prove anything about today’s climate.
It doesn’t prove that today’s heat is ordinary.
It doesn’t prove that today’s heat is unprecedented.
It doesn’t prove that climate change isn’t happening.
It proves something much smaller.
And, to me, much more important.
It proves that the past is still capable of speaking for itself.
Or at least that some people are still willing to let it.
Because the great danger isn’t that people remember things incorrectly.
The great danger is that we become so certain about what the past must have been that we stop allowing people to remember it at all.
There is something almost comical about it.
An old man remembers the roads of his childhood.
An old woman tells him that his memory is impossible.
A younger man stands there thinking that he remembers the same thing.
And somewhere in the background sits the official temperature record, perfectly indifferent to all of us.
Perhaps the record will tell us that today really was exceptional.
Perhaps it will tell us that it wasn’t.
Fine.
Let’s look at the record.
But let’s not throw away everything that cannot be reduced to a number.
Because there is a difference between historical measurement and lived experience.
The thermometer tells you the temperature.
The person standing outside tells you what the temperature did to the world.
Both can be true.
Both can be wrong.
And both deserve to be examined.
What I found encouraging today was not that the old gentleman agreed with me.
It was that he was willing to disagree with the story.
He didn’t seem particularly interested in what he was supposed to remember.
He remembered what he remembered.
That is becoming an increasingly rare form of intellectual courage.
We live surrounded by narratives.
Everything has a narrative now.
The weather has a narrative.
Politics has a narrative.
Economics has a narrative.
History has a narrative.
Even our own memories are increasingly expected to fit into narratives supplied by somebody else.
And once the narrative has been established, anything that contradicts it becomes suspicious.
You must have remembered incorrectly.
You misunderstood.
You are exaggerating.
That never happened.
And eventually people stop talking.
They stop bringing their memories into the conversation because they don’t want to be told that their own lives are somehow inadmissible evidence.
That is a loss.
Not because every old person’s memory is correct.
But because a society that no longer permits messy memories to exist becomes intellectually sterile.
I don’t need the old man to prove that today’s heat is nothing special.
I don’t need the old lady to prove that it is.
And I certainly don’t need either of them to tell me what I experienced.
Today was hot.
Very hot.
Perhaps extraordinarily hot.
The city is still baked.
The night is still warm.
And tomorrow the records will tell us exactly where today sits in the long line of measurements.
Good.
Let’s have the numbers.
But let’s also keep the memories.
Because somewhere between the thermometer and the recollection of an old man standing in a supermarket queue is a much more complicated truth about how human beings experience the world.
And perhaps the most important thing is simply this:
There are still people who have the courage to bring their memories out into the open instead of quietly submitting them to whatever narrative happens to be fashionable.
I would rather hear the memory.
Then check the record.
Not the other way around.