Serenity is hard to find in a city. Even the parks are often crowded with those seeking solace from the bustling pace or somewhere to pause.
Only one place is ever truly calm: The cemeteries of Berlin possess a morbid serenity.
Friedhof: a field of peace.
The German captures a feeling the English “graveyard” misses, but which the origins of cemetery* come closer to expressing.
Cemetery, from dormitory, a place to sleep.
The city is ever buzzing, ever moving, ever changing.
In the cemeteries there is only silence, only slow and steady decay.
What better place to contemplate life than surrounded by the utter stillness of death…
We are compelled to pause, to think, to evaluate what matters.
The ivy grows thick and green. Life feeds on death.
Peace is found among commotion.
We contemplate the eternal pause
*Cemetery comes from Late Latin coemeterium, from Greek koimeterion “sleeping place, dormitory”