How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays

How Not to Know the Time

The watch whose description I am reading (Patek Philippe calibre 89) is a pocket watch, a double case in eighteen-carat gold, endowed with thirty-three functions. The magazine article introducing the watch does not indicate the price, I suppose because of lack of space (though it would suffice to indicate the number of billions without printing all the zeros). Seized by a profound frustration, I went out and bought myself a new Casio for fifty thousand lire, just as all those who feel a mad desire for a Ferrari go out and calm themselves by purchasing at least a car radio. Anyway, to carry a pocket watch, I would have to buy an appropriate waistcoat as well.

Or, I told myself, I could keep it on the table. I would spend hours and hours knowing the day, the week, the month, the year, the decade, the century, the year's position in the leap-year cycle, hour, minute, and second of daylight saving time, hour, minute, and second in the time zone of my choice, temperature, sidereal time, moon phase, time of dawn and time of sunset, equation of time, position of the sun in the zodiac—not to mention the fun I could have shuddering at the infinity of the complete and mobile depiction of the stellar map, or pressing the stop button at the various dials of the chronograph and the tachymeter, or deciding when I should rest a moment and relax in the assurance of the built-in alarm. I was forgetting: a special indicator would show how much power remained. And still another thing: if I wanted, I could also know the exact time. But why should I?

If I were to possess this miracle, I would have no interest in knowing that it is ten minutes past ten. On the contrary, I would observe the rise and the setting of the sun (and I could do this even in a darkened room), I would learn the temperature, I would cast horoscopes, I would dream in the daytime of the blue dial where I could see the stars at night, but I would spend the night meditating on the time remaining before Easter. With such a watch it is no longer necessary to bother about external time, because that would become our sole concern for all our lives; and the time the watch narrates would be, not the immobile reflection of eternity, but eternity in progress. In other words, time would be only a fabled hallucination produced by that magic mirror.

I raise these issues because, for a while now, there have been magazines available devoted to collectible watches, rather expensive magazines printed on shiny paper with full-color pages, and I wonder whether they are bought only by readers who leaf through them as though they were volumes of fairy tales, or whether the publications are addressed to a public of serious purchasers, as I sometimes suspect. This would mean that the more the mechanical watch, miracle of centuries of experience, becomes useless, the stronger and more widespread is the desire to display, to regard fondly, to cherish as an investment, these wondrous and perfect time machines.

It is obvious that these machines are not designed to communicate the fleeting hour. The abundance of functions and their elegant distribution over numerous and symmetrical dials mean that, to learn that it is twenty past three on Friday, May 24, you have to shift your eyes at some length, following the movement of numerous hands, as, in sequence, you record the information in a notebook. For that matter, the envious Japanese electronics experts, now ashamed of their former practicality, have come out with promises of microscopic dials that will display barometric pressure, altitude, ocean depth, countdown timing, and temperature, not to mention, of course, data bank, telemetric time indicator, eight alarms, money-changing calculator, and hour signal.

All these clocks, like the whole information industry today, run the risk of no longer communicating anything because they tell too much. But they also possess another characteristic of the information industry: they no longer speak of anything except themselves and their internal functioning. The zenith is reached in some ladies' watches with imperceptible hands, just a marble face without hours or minutes, shaped in such a way that, at most, you could say we are somewhere between noon and midnight, and perhaps it's the day before yesterday. Anyway (as the designer hints), what else do the ladies for whom the watch is meant have to do, except look at a device that narrates its own vanity?

1988