The Companionship of a Watch

When's the last time you checked the draft folder of your email account? If you're like me, you save all sorts of things in there. Then they get forgotten. My email account keeps telling me to clear space as its almost out of memory, so recently I found myself working through years of drafts. It was like a day spent in the attic going through dusty boxes and folders.

One thing I found was this rather odd composition, which I submitted to the RTE radio show Sunday Miscellany. They didn't bite. (I have had one piece broadcast on the show, but I've submitted many more.)

I think it's not bad, in a quirky kind of way. Here it is.

A few weeks ago, I bought a new watch at a catalogue store counter, for ten euro. I’d put off the acquisition for as long as possible. My old watch, which had cost the same amount, was literally hanging on by a thread, its strap frayed almost to snapping point. It had slid off my arm on many occasions. Reluctantly, because I am very sentimental about old things—even when they are only a few months old—I decided its career had come to an end, and bought its replacement.

My new watch looked almost exactly like my old watch; a brown imitation leather strap, and a brass-coloured dial which, in these digital days, is described by the rather incongruous term “analogue”. It took me all of one or two minutes to choose it from the display case.

All the same, I found myself looking at this watch more often, and more interestedly, than I’d looked at most of my previous watches. Not for utilitarian reasons, but rather for reasons which I might term aesthetic or—if I’m going to be particularly high-flown about it—spiritual.

My new watch is slightly, ever so slightly, more ornamental than my old watch. The Arabic numerals are slanted somewhat to the right, with rather pronounced serifs. The dial of the watch—which I would much rather call a face—is a pale gold. Slight as the differences are, they are enough to make my attention linger on it every time I look at it, enough to start a reverie.

There are few things in the world which are as inherently poetic as a clock or a watch, if the poetry has not been leeched out of it by a sleek modernistic design. Half of the poems and songs ever written are about the passage of time, the unattainability of the past, the drama and suspense of the present moment. The moving hands and stationary numerals of a watch dramatise all this with delicious understatement.

But, in the case of a wrist-watch, the poetry goes further. The little clock on my wrist is my own private domain, my own private retreat. In the ordinary course of events, nobody is going to look at it except for me. Every time I consult it, I’m momentarily drawn away from the stress and flux of the outside world to this utterly reliable, utterly serene sanctuary where the seconds, minutes and hours are counted out, one by one, imperturbably.

All through the varied moments of my life, my clockwork companion is accompanying me, loyally and patiently. When I’m asleep and lost in the weird timeless world of dreams, it’s evenly measuring out those moments according to the reassuring, dependable chronology of the waking world. In my most stressful moments, my watch is calmly living through them with me, a second at a time. On difficult days, it’s hanging on there with me, repeating its unspoken and unseen message that this, too, will pass. It’s always there.

The watch on my wrist seems, also, like a symbol of the strange duality of time. Time is public, but it’s also utterly private. Even our use of language indicates this; we talk about “man-hours”, as though human beings produce time in the same way glow-worms produce light. People ask each other, “How was your day?”, acknowledging the essentially subjective nature of time.

So looking at my watch reminds me of the irreducibly personal nature of experience. If a person has nothing at all in the world, he has at least this. Even if a person has never ventured outside his native country, even if he has never done or seen anything exceptional, the world as he experiences it is utterly unique to himself. The force of this mystery strikes me out of the blue, at the most surprising moments. If you are separated from a companion for ten or five minutes, even the most banal experiences that they report can seem like news from another world, somewhere utterly inaccessible now and forever; the scene underneath the glass dome of the snow globe, a place you can never go. And the watch on my wrist, patiently ticking away, announcing the time to me and me alone, reminds me that I also experience a unique world through unrepeatable seconds, minutes and hours.