A recent auction in Geneva yielded thirty-one million dollars, with a rare Patek Philippe Ref. 1518 netting over three and a half million dollars. Meanwhile, Apple has released six generations of its watch series for five hundred dollars a piece. The difference between the smartwatch and the heirloom timepiece resides not only in the way each watch marks time, but the way each reveals our aspirations of beauty or efficiency.
For those who prefer naked wrists, wearing a watch may seem odd. But the watch has always meant more than clocking the hour. It marks a person who cares about an organized life. For the owner of a cherished watch, time is sacred, set apart, worthy of attention. When we are lost in the chaos of the world, we turn to our wrist companion to provide bearing for our place in time.
I love the classic watch because it is intrinsically tied to the beauty embedded in tradition, a physical representation of inherited social practices. Our world is compartmentalized and individualistic, but the watch reminds me I am connected to a story.
In his novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison describes receiving an heirloom as one that “joined him with his ancestors, marked a high point of his present, and promised a concreteness to his nebulous and chaotic future.”
My 1970s Omega Seamaster was a gift from my father. He passed it to me during a trip home from university. He didn’t need to say much. The gesture itself, the object passing from him to me, told me I was becoming my own man. I ran my fingers over the deep creases in the auburn leather band. Its hands flashed gold, and I glimpsed a few scratches on its surface, etched over decades of faithful time-giving.
I’ve since added marks of my own to the heirloom. Someday, I hope to pass this same watch to my son, along with love for the soft tick of the second hand and the wear on the leather strap. These things are physical reminders of moments past. Life is not unlimited; we age together, the watch alongside my body.
No one I know would pass along an Apple watch as an heirloom. The appeal of smart tech comes in innovation and cutting-edge function. Apple watches necessarily fall into obsolescence. In contrast, my father’s timepiece serves as a steady friend speaking with a singular voice. No weather, no emails, just the time across generations, unshrouded by an LED display.
Over the past several years, I’ve seen friends and colleagues succumb to the steady encroachment of technology upon body and mind. The smartwatch is such an intrusion. One second it is black as obsidian, the next it blares your latest text message. Its presence is brazen. The smartphone has metastasized, grafting itself onto one’s wrist and refusing to unfasten from the body even in the shower, now with its upgraded water-resistance. At the slightest movement, it will flash at you in a glaring blue light. The smartwatch is less a companion and more another soldier in the technological invasion.
I will grant that my timepiece is not as precise as an Apple watch, nor can it double as a communication device. For those whose minds obsess over data and numbers, the classic watch is inconceivable. But that is precisely the trouble.
The smartwatch is born of a world of efficiency and engineered mastery. It is the world of the utilitarian. Yet the life ruled by the smartwatch is sterile, reducing moments to measurable metrics and tasks. Music becomes sound wave frequencies; a serene woodland becomes a profit to be harvested. Such a watch demands that you live according to an exactitude that is inhuman.
The contrast with a simple timepiece, powered only by a battery or motion, is stark. The limits of its function remind us that life is not an incoherent kaleidoscope of time, space, and electronic data. When I consult my watch, I see time as it is, apart from the incessant intrusion of a fourth dimension from which it grows increasingly hard to unplug. If I stroll in the park or await my whole chicken roasting in the oven, my watch sets a frame for how I interact with the world. I live according to seconds, according to the present task; I do not live by milliseconds, nor by urgent notifications. Time belongs to me, not vice versa, just as “the sabbath was made for man.” I resist the trend to become a devotee to a world that respects no boundary. My watch is a bulwark against this trend. Time is to be set apart, and I with it.