Time from some new angles

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, time, cultural history

I have thought and thought, and I just don't know how to approach Timekeepers by Simon Garfield. That is to say, I have no clever approach; no warm, fuzzy stories; no chuckle-inducing anecdotes.

The book is about the experience of time. Within, the author reacts to our steadily increasing overscheduling. He also journeys to some special places where time is perhaps a commodity, or contrariwise, something to be largely ignored.

The two chapters that most appealed to my inner geek were "Horology Part One: How to Make a Watch" and "Horology Part Two: How to Sell the Time". In the first, the author visited the one Swiss watch factory that allows you to do this: At IWC (formerly International Watch Company), for a (hefty) fee, you can remove a portion of an assembled watch, 17 parts, and then put them back in again. You are at a desk with an intimidating array of tools for handling the tiny parts such as screws about the size of a poppy seed. The portions you get to "play with" were originally assembled by a craftsman who routinely puts them in within a quarter of an hour or so. You are given about an hour. The author took longer.

In the second, back in his English home, the author ruminates on the rapturous language used to engage the interest of the sort of person who just might be in the market for a watch costing as much as a rather good auto. We are not talking about the TAG Heuer watches that are advertised in certain mens' magazines for a few thousand dollars (or pounds sterling). These are in the £20,000 and up class, topping out in the £200,000 range (in dollars, that's about $26,000 to $260,000). An example, from an email:

Franc Vila is pleased to present you the RV EVOS 18 Cobra Suspended Skeleton in texalium...

Yeah, I didn't know what texalium is either, so I had to look it up. It is a woven carbon fiber product, perhaps similar to the stuff they use to make high-end golf club shafts. The Franc Vila website is revealing…and contains lots of zeroes. Here is a picture of the watch in question. Would you pay $20,000+ for it?

But all this is just one aspect of time. There is a chapter on tempi (tempos for the non-musical). Beethoven had his own ideas about the meanings of words such as Lento, Adagio, Allegro and so forth. So, just how long "should" it take to perform the Ninth Symphony? Recent recordings, presumably being played at the speed they were recorded, mostly range from 62:30 to just under 70 minutes, and then there is the outlier: Leonard Bernstein conducting the Ninth at the Berlin Wall in 1989, in nearly 82 minutes. Would Beethoven have been happy with any of these? Possibly, but he was famously cantankerous and, given modern recording equipment (and a miraculous hearing aid), he just might insist on re-recording it "his" way.

Well, there are 15 chapters, including a long final one on a few time-involved sections of the British Museum. These days, museums, including the one I work at, tend to focus a lot on time sequences, particularly when geology is involved. After all, rocks range in age from almost-right-now, such as a recently crystallized mineral specimen from a briny lake, to just under 4.4 billion years ancient. Even an art museum will typically have the date a work was produce on a card nearby, and certain halls are arranged chronologically, particularly if a featured artist went through "periods".

Look at your wrist. Does time have a handcuff on you? The first wristwatch was produced in 1812. The first "affordable" watch came nearly 100 years later. Are we the better for it? Simon Garfield would say a definite "Maybe, maybe not." He did manage to find one culture, the Inuit, who have a language without "time" in it, and the people live by the skies and the seasons. Not bad work if you can get it.