My phone is a Pharaoh and one that I give much of my time to. It's a tax on my time just to have it in my pocket. This became apparent to me, not because my wife had mentioned that I stare at my phone a lot (she has), or because I read a blog or timely article about the problems with smartphone (I've read). Rather, I discovered it shortly after purchasing a pocket watch on a whim, partly because I thought it a cool thing, and partly because it really is just a cool thing.
It shortly dawned on me after purchase that a pocket watch could be a distraction from my distractions, the physical gratification of carrying something that held as much weight as a smartphone. I could check the time without wasting time. It takes longer to read an analog clockface than a digital clock but the extra five seconds spent doing the simple math and reading between the lines is not the extra five minutes that I would have spend checking on some foolish crusade I was having on Facebook. It was a nice change, and perhaps my wife noticed. I had made a new friend that required less time of me, and gave me exactly what I needed to reach in my pocket for -- the time.
That watch broke, mostly because it was a souvenir watch. But I enjoyed it nonetheless. It was a sad day when I realized there was no surgical procedure I could do that would reliably improve the watch's timekeeping. It was, as my wife says, a cheap watch.
Recently (five days ago), I unwrapped a particular box which was covered in wrapping paper on Christmas Eve. Inside it came a mechanical watch, a much better quality one than the one I had left on the desk for its cursed unreliability.
This mechanical watch is just that. Mechanical. You manually wind it and must remember to do this once a day or you will lose track of time or else resort to checking your smartphone (which is now the reason why I carry both around -- the watch for the time, the smartphone to make compulsive changes to the watch's time, see?).
This particular watch is mesmerizing if only for its presentation when you click open the clasp. Now I find myself thirty seconds in a moment staring at the innards of the pocket watch. The magic. The mechanical clicking. Sometimes I place it close to my ear just to hear the clock tick its way to the next minute. I feel the tempo of the watch (which is about 240 beats per minute, should you imagine that a watch actually keeps time). I watch the clock hands move around the face. I watch the minute hand move ever close to a superimposed position over a particular aligned letter. I watch the white space disappear in between the letters, as the minute hand casts its lunar eclipse over the Roman numerals shaped like "I" or "III". The solar eclipse, brought by the slow-moving hour hand, is not nearly as exciting, but I check back on it to see where the time has gone.I used to be so adept at reading analog clocks when all my elementary school colleagues suffered or worse switched to digital clocks. It takes me a couple seconds to do the math nowadays.
I've come to the realization that I carry a small and nigh limitless world in my pocket. It has a battery life but it paints at lightspeed brick roads from my address to news rooms and picture stories across the sea. I travel at the speed of information (which nowadays is faster than our ability to translate it from the data we receive every second) with my thumbs barely moving. In the hands of its owner, the smartphone is a bridge to many worlds, and to many fake-worlds, and to many hyper-real worlds.
Yet I see now that it is a good thing to refrain from looking through the corridors of current events, or the conversations, the debates, the blog posts. My iPhone is as much a blessing as it is the possibility of cursing, if only my life consisted of my thumbs and an LTE connection and eyes, and the cold, precise electrical signals I send to write another instantaneous message in a bottle for no one.
In my phone, there is a gateway to worlds, but through my pocket watch, which has no internet, is only so precise over a respective period of time, and must be wound once a day like an old dog which needs to be walked to stave off its worsening dysplasia, is a mirror and reminder of another world. One which surrounds me more fully and follows me more closely than the screens of social media and constructed persona ever will.
Because I can look at a pocket watch to tell the time, I'm not so often whisked away in my propensity for distraction. Instead, I can look at the time, and respond to my wife, who is talking to me no matter which apparatus I use to check the time. The little world of time, moving pieces, some whose movements are undetectable unless I stare at the watch and risk bored, is really just a mirror of the waking reality I walk in -- the one in which I am able to hold a fuller conversation with my wife, and she can know me more, and I her, and be more aware of my immediate surroundings than of the musings and amusement of the social media sphere. My little pocket watch is an entrance to the most interesting world I have discovered -- that of my wife.
I've gots a pocketwatch in my pocketses, and I don't mean to remove it any time soon, excepting to check the time, and to conceit an increase in attractive appearance to my wife, the one who dressed it for me. But perhaps it was more that Someone dressed me for it, and further, me for her and not for an iPhone.
Nick
