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We have a special relationship with them: the clock fascinates us, counting the precious seconds of our lives. Not having the power to stop time, people always seemed to strive to pay tribute to it – embodying it in gold, decorating it with enamel and expensive stones.
Finding out what time it is is not a problem for any of us – just glance at the screen of a mobile, computer, car dashboard or one of the countless street displays. And yet, recognizing the convenience of flashing and luminous numbers, many of us are still partial to wristwatches. It is a special pleasure to wear them, feeling the bracelet on your wrist, looking at the dial or trying to catch the invisible movement of the thin hand. “A watch is a strange toy for a person,” reflects the philosopher Natalia Isayeva. – A kind of memento mori, which we wear with amazing stubbornness on our hands … “
Classical mechanics
Probably, one of the reasons for our loyalty to wristwatches is that today their main task is to determine not so much time intervals that are common for all of us, but the personal style of each of their owners. In the history of mankind, there are few objects that have enjoyed such attention of artists, artisans, and jewelers in all ages. And of course, passionate collectors. So, for example, among them there are those who care about models of only one brand. Others admire such a quality as complexity: the name is not important, the main thing is the sophisticated magnificence of the mechanics. There are collectors of tourbillons, minute repeaters, perpetual calendars and other incredible mechanisms, thanks to which the watch has always been synonymous with the most delicate and masterful work.
“Watches can also be seen as a cultural phenomenon,” recalls Carlos Rosillo, one of the founders of the Bell & Ross brand. – In fact, this is an object that we constantly carry with us and which reminds us that time goes on and on. I personally am especially interested in mechanical watches: in my opinion, they have a philosophical dimension that goes beyond purely consumer value. We always perceive them as a noble, durable thing that carries traditions. We pass on such watches by inheritance – on my desk there is a pocket watch with a minute repeater, which is already over two hundred years old. And where will most of those momentary things that we use today be in two centuries? This special attitude of ours was also caught by haute couture houses, which every year renew their collections of mechanical time keepers. “This sector has become strategic for us,” says Laurence Nicolas, CEO of Dior Montres*.
Precious modesty
“In the XNUMXst century, due to lack of time, people buy watches,” reflects the writer and publisher Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber (Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber). “Some pay dearly for them, as if they were making an atoning sacrifice to the inexorable Chronos. Glittering with gold, and even with precious stones, the watches of bygone times are evidence that such offerings to the all-powerful deity were familiar to many eras. Nowadays, men seem to be especially active donors: after all, watches are practically the only jewel with which they can still adorn themselves. Gone are the tie pins, the chains across the waistcoat… Only these boxes on the wrist remain, the price of which, with the same functions, can sometimes skyrocket. The perfect vehicle for a discreet display of status.”**
And indeed: even the best watches can look modest and turn the heads of many, deliberately not conspicuous. Their smooth case contains another paradox for our perception: we consider the main advantage of any functional item to be its reliability, however, all the many tiny watch parts live their own lives, move, the smallest teeth cling to each other, as it seems, increasing the risk of stopping the precious mechanism … But it only seems. Virtuoso fragility, the embodiment of our eternal dream of the reliability of human existence – our watches accompany us daily and continue to go forward. And it is precisely this, perhaps, that gives us hope.
* See worldtempus.com for details
** J.-L. Servan-Schreiber “The New Art of Time” (Albin Michel, 2000).
Natalia Isaeva, historian of religion and philosophy, leading researcher of the Russian Academy of Sciences, lecturer at the University of Paris-8 (France). “We are stretched between time and eternity”
“In any metropolitan city – be it Paris or Moscow – you inevitably live at some crazy speed, the days are already scheduled for many years ahead, and you keep running, running … Minutes are ticking, precious seconds of life are leaving, the sand is still waking up, – only we can’t turn the glass of this hourglass over again, we can’t either slow down or start over … Therefore, the clock – even if we are talking about miraculously appearing and disappearing Breguet – is actually a strange toy for a person, a kind of memento mori, which we carry with amazing stubbornness on our hands …
I think there is no cure for this – it is impossible to coincide with (or reconcile with) your time. For me, here my studies in philosophy became a tuning fork and a guideline: after all, a person has already been created in such a way that he is all stretched between time and eternity … Only eternity is not a long time at all, it does not at all consist of segments of time glued together. A piece, a fragment of time (for example, our life) is a fragment, a shard of a jug … But from the point of view of eternity, this jug did not break at all, time did not begin, because at the “end of time”, having entered eternity, we will receive the same the jug is intact … And what remains for our share? Diligently painting its walls while we are alive is just so that later the Lord could tell us: a good pattern was here from the very beginning … After all, each of us, who paints his own, in the end, is this sign himself, a kind of hieroglyph of being, and God distinguishes us (each one separately) according to this sign of the spirit. If, during our lifetime, we did not allow the pattern to appear (as an image appears on photographic paper), there is a risk of remaining unrecognized in the eyes of God, which means disappearing, not coming true, slamming our immortality (like “foolish virgins”, who have no oil in the lamps – the Bridegroom came, but they remained in the dark, and he did not notice them …) This jug of our earthly existence, existence in time, has an elongated neck, a swan neck – that bend, the extreme point where time comes into contact with eternity. Existence itself is most fully revealed within a single “instant” (Øieblik – that is, “the blink of an eye”, “blink of an eye”, as Kierkegaard would say), – an instant that appears primarily as a sensation “I am”, an experience in the fullness of the present states, as an inner feeling: right now, at this very moment, I look at the world through my pupils, which are still open to life. I found a terribly curious parallel to this in the work of Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky “Philosopher of the Theater” (1923): “Resnota” is all the variegated diversity of the visible world, which in essence is no longer than eyelashes, although it seems huge and multi-spatial. A momentary flutter of eyelashes, a single fleeting glance, which already contains the world and even that which, in the final analysis, transgressively passes and overcomes the limits of this world … Therefore, this flying, transient, fleeting moment of bliss is already, as the same Kierkegaard says, “an atom of eternity”, more precisely, an instant prick and a puncture in the film of earthly time, a real ontological exit to eternity, instantly opening doors leading to immortality. In our squirrel run in a circle, we are prisoners of time, while soteriology is always a field of freedom. In Indian Advaita Vedanta, “liberation” is invariably connected with the fact that the individual soul throws off its shells and covers – including the covers of earthly time – and, as it were, is drawn inside, into a single luminous point, into a single consciousness, a single look. The soul becomes aware of itself as Brahman (aham brahmâsmi – “I am Brahman”) – and thereby returns to itself. As if we have a coin in our hands, from the obverse – absolute reality “as it is”, pure consciousness, but in our palm the coin always lies upside down – we see this whole multi-colored, diverse world, where there are objects and psychological phenomena, living beings – “from plants to gods”, laws and moral obligations, sacred texts and folk legends… Real freedom and true immortality come when we turn over a coin. It is only at this very moment that time ends and space, memory and everything that is so diligently collected by the soul in its wanderings are curtailed – and only a pure, unclouded consciousness turns out to be real, a pure look coming from within – like a ray of light running through black, empty space. , – a ray of light, not visible from the outside, for an outside observer, but absolutely tangible for oneself … That is why the image of a fluid, melting clock from Dali’s painting “La persistencia de la memoria” is closest to me – “Persistent constancy of memory”.