Old watches are my weakness. Old watches and old fountain pens. Okay, old watches, old pens, books of any age and cowboy boots. But that’s it. And most of all it’s watches.
You can understand the pen thing: I’m a writer. But watches? Time—what it is, how it felt to other people, why it goes so fast, what it does to memory and perspective, how to handle it in a piece of work—time is the great mystery a writer grapples with. This one, anyway. So a timepiece, in which the mystery is caught, ordered and beautifully expressed, is a comforting thing to wear. And when a deadline looms as it always does, I want to be able to find out in the most beautiful way just how little time I’ve got to go.
I don’t go in for fancy things. I believe in style, not in fashion. I’m with whoever it was who said that beauty is simplicity in perfec- tion. The most beautiful things work—and go on working—
elegantly, without drawing attention to themselves. A nice watch, like a good pen, is a beautiful tool.
I like old pens and watches because I’m drawn to original things; I like to feel connected, physically, to other lives and other times and places. When I wear my favourite wristwatch, this 1930s Lord Elgin, I feel like I’m continuing a story that began seventy years ago. Here’s this watch designed by people, long gone now, to look good and keep the time, and here it still is, on my wrist, looking good and keeping time for me as it has done for two or three other people before me.Wearing it, I feel like I get to live in other moments, even as I live right up to the minute in my own. In a small way, it makes my life and my world a little larger than they seem. And it keeps me humble.
To live as much in other lives and time zones as one’s own, to feel humble and to inhabit stories—this is the writer’s fate. This, and poverty, and the agony of how to make the next decent sentence.
I believe in traditions, in keeping alive the (good) things that have worked well from the start. I’m not sold on much that’s new: I make an exception of my laptop. And I am allergic to the faux. It’s authenticity I admire most in a book or a person or a pair of boots or a pen. I want the real thing, if I can afford it, and I want to put it to work for me. Here’s another thing: it feels right to have to wind a watch, don’t ask me exactly why. It makes it seem like it depends on me, as I depend on it. It lets me take part in it.
My favourite watch has an inscription on the back: HWN 11/12/39. I’ve always imagined it was a twenty-first birthday present given to a boy who probably went off to war soon after. I have no idea what happened to him, but his watch has come to me. Not long before I got the watch, my wife and I had a boy and named him Henry William—HW. These are the kinds of loops and buckles in time, the kinds of repetitions, that fascinate me.
I like the form and size and quiet ornamentation of my watch, which is small for a man’s timepiece. It’s restrained. I like the way the tiny second hand moves in its own orbit. I like the gold deco numerals on the off-white face. I go for square watches, and rectan- gles, like this one. Mine bows out at the sides, its pretty face caught in parentheses, and it arcs to hug the wrist. It sits flush against oneself.
I like the way its glass arches elegantly over it like the sky over the ground. The whole thing is curvilinear.
In fact, now that I think about it, this watch is a little less straight than it seems. Like the earth; like time; like a good line; like style.
I fell for the watch the day I first saw it. I’ve bought most of my old pens and watches—not that there are many of them—from a man called Bill Newman, and it was in his shop that I saw the Elgin. It wasn’t long since I’d bought a watch from Bill, and I couldn’t think what I’d done, particularly, to deserve another so soon, let alone afford it. But it wouldn’t leave me alone. It ticked away in my dreams. A month later I took Maree to show her how lovely was the watch and to recite to her the many reasons I shouldn’t get it. She agreed with me about everything. A week later, the graduation ceremony came around for a doctorate I’d finished the year before. As I was getting dressed, Maree came in, made me shut my eyes and strapped the Elgin to my wrist.
Did I mention my wife earlier, when I listed my weaknesses? So this is a watch I plan to keep winding and wearing, and servicing every other year. With all that wearing its glass is getting scratched already. But I know a watch guy who tells me he can fix that. If I ever write anything that sells and makes me half famous, I may auction the watch and set up a fund to do the kind of good my books and poems will never do on their own. Until then, I’m keeping it—or it’s keeping me. I suspect I’m the one who’ll wear out first. Before I do, I’d like to pass it on to someone; I have the boy
in mind. That’s what I think you should do with traditions: make them new by making them yours, and then pass them on.
This chapter’s about that kind of tradition and that kind of style. It’s about what this watch is about: old-fashioned grace and cool, and the techniques for achieving them, sentence after sentence in the face of fashion and time.
T RY T H I S
1 Do you have something like my watch—a beautiful tool, an elegant, timeless, serviceable thing you love to use? Write a few hundred words about it.
2 Are you still wearing anything you bought more than ten years ago? Write about it in three hundred words. Try to write about it in a style that becomes that stylish garment.