The watch

A practical reminder of what’s to come.

Time has a way of changing our perspective. The inevitable passage of time makes of us young radicals the staunchest conservative. Every moment we preocupy ourselves with each tick of the clock feels boresome because we know it can never come back. All life bears this natural instinct to buy itself a few more precious ticks, and like moths drawn to a torch we fight every day to see yet another cycle repeat. Some rebel against the inevitability of this force of nature (calling for an end to its tyranny). Some do not.

We humans have kept time for millenia, in one form or another, yet the revolution brought forth by the portable watch is fairly recent in our collective history. Likewise, this revolution and its promises (like many others) were only truly fulfilled years after its novelty came to pass. In this case, it was the introduction of the telegraph that allowed information and time to be combined acurately: the dwellers of London and Greenwitch alike could now set their watches to the same time — travelers could now rely on their watch to be correct throughout the country, however far from their timekeepers they might have been. And so, watches not only became more efficient — they fundamentally changed how we operate.

Over a century and a half later, we stand in yet a new age. Clocks are no longer syncronised by men, but by other machines, which themselves are composed by them. Down to the tiniest moment, we have nearly mastered the art of synchronisation and are held back only by the very limits of physics, as information moves back and forth at the speed of light. The watch itself, technically redundant in its usefulness to telling the time by its successor — the mobile telephone, constantly updated by a forest of antenae or a constelation of satellites — has thus fully assumed the other end it serves: that of individuality. Children wear colourful watches bearing their favourite cartoons. My grandfather sports the same I have always seen him fasten far too tightly around his wrist. My father left me a whole collection of watches he seldom used, now preferring to use a knock-off “smart” watch he takes too much pride in. From all of these details one can infer some information as to who these people are: the Pluto-loving child; the stubborn old man who likes his habits; the farsighted chaser of the current trends. Watches always transpired this about their wearers, but now it is their near-exclusive role. Nonetheless, the exercise of wearing a watch is deeply personal. Whatever we may aim to show to others, we are showing ourselves far more.

For well over a decade I have listened to a muffled beeping noise every day at around 19:00. Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep. For some reason I never quite understood where it came from: the neighbours? — no, my walls could not be that thin. Deep within my closet lay a box with mementos from my childhood. Among them a battered Casio, with a broken wristband and scratched display rested for years. It was the offer of a childhood friend — a small, silver module with a black plastic wristband. Besides telling the time, it had an alarm and offered a small backlight at the push of a button. The alarm was set for 07:30, the time I woke up to go to school.

P.M.

Those letters taunted me. I remembered wearing the watch often in my primary school years and beyond, but I had no recollection of waking up to the sound of beeping as a child. My childish curiosity likely managed to set the alarm, although unaware of the nuance that A.M. and P.M. offered in a country where the hours of the day are mostly written in their 24-hour format. The fact that I set aside the watch after coming home likely made me not notice the alarm, and with time I eventually forgot. And so for years after setting that watch aside for good I took for granted that sound, just before dinner time, growing indifferent to it until the day I rummaged through my old things and found the watch, with its 10-year-lasting advertised battery, still running after what likely amounted to fifteen or more years of service and it all made sense then.

For most of those years I rarely wore a watch. My father tried to convince me, offering some from the many bootlegged copies he owned (Lisbon is known to hold an aptly named weekly market — Feira do Relógio, the “watch market” — which he often frequented), but my skinny wrists did not fair well with most watches, and as I grew up and got my first phone I became accostumed to just reaching to that to look at the time. Until that fateful encounter with the beeping mystery of my home.