Love for a Mechanical Watch
16 April 2008There is nothing more personal to us than our Time; how we spend it, enjoy its passing moments, especially how we measure it and look upon its face in a watch on your wrist. Our life is a measure of passing Time as it surrounds us in its Past, Present and our Future.
And so it is with watches. We can translate our very thinking and reasoning with the way we feel about the watch on our wrist.
Ordinary quartz watches are cheaper, independent and will function without our attention even if we forget them for a year. When we discover them a year later, it will still be running. It will still be accurate and we can take it for granted. It certainly does not need us. By their manufactured existence they are independent robots and they fail to touch our hearts in the deepest sense.
Mechanical watches, on the other hand depend on us for their very survival. We give it life and sustenance. The automatic mechanical or hand wound watch takes its power from our very motions and is a symbiotic mechanical organism on our own body. Without your movement there would not be the energy stored inside for its heart to beat (or tick). It would die or stop living for the lack of our attention. It is you who feed it and care for it, just like your own child.
These mechanical timepieces give back to us that visual splendor of a beautiful work of art; its very ticking of its watch heart can be viewed on some of them through its back. It allows us to gaze upon it in wonderment at the intricacies of its moving micro-metallic organs. The graceful sweep of the seconds’ hand enthralls the best of us. The rapid beat of the tick-a-tick quickens your own pulse. And then there is the quiet whirr of the rotor as we swing our arms or the ratcheting of the manual winding! What do you call this, but pleasure of the highest order, as it gets its existence and life on your very own wrist. What better feedback can we ask for? This and the comforting feeling that it will be by our side, a faithful companion sharing our lives and experiences being there with us for a long time to come. Something that we cannot say for sure with an ordinary quartz watch! Once we get tired of their quartz/battery independence, their life is over and we toss them to the wayside.
However the automatic or hand wound watch requires our gentle, loving ministrations in our daily ritual that coaxes it to life on our wrist. It is our own special time that we spend with it every day. Yes you really do need a mechanical watch that needs you. It is there to engage us, seduce us and regale us in its own subtle way.
What caring human being would want anything else on their wrist!
-Thanks to Stephen Rovtar and various unknown authors for putting together this post.
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