What is a watch? Some will call it a measuring device, others a status symbol or an accessory. But there are also people who see in a watch a model of universe. This idea is not new. You could see it in quotations, pictures and even movies. But it was never formulated as an independent theory.
The time of pagans was cyclic. Everything was born from dust and returned to dust in the end according to the cosmic cycles. That’s why ancient gods have eternal lives: they are the symbols of eternity. The only thing they are afraid of is oblivion. Oblivion is the most terrible penalty: not physical but a moral death of a god. Christians were the first to say that our world is not cyclic and one day everything will come to an end. And with the idea that nothing is eternal the measuring of time was born.
Circle trap
In the world of Christianity nothing repeats and every deed of a person has its consequences. If we try to imagine an ideal Christian watch it should look like an incredibly long candle divided into equal segments. While the segments are burning people are born and die and do what they are to do. And when the candle will burn down a new world will come to existence.
Unfortunately, in Middle Ages it was practically impossible to create such a device. That’s why to measure the segments of their lives people needed something more compact and precise. Galileo’s pendulum became such a device. It was a rather linear device that replaced the eternally long candle. But the result was quite unexpected: on the basis of the pendulum people created balance spiral and a circular dial with hands that, from the Christian point of view, was the symbol of depressive eternity.
So the watch transformed into a thing whose essence was quite the opposite of Christian ideas about time: a timepiece became a symbol of something cyclic and eternal. Maybe that’s why some historians connect crisis of Christianity with the invention of watch: people again started to believe in cyclic time which repeats eternally.
The World is Limited
In the age of technical progress the humankind was developing so violently creating so many things that some of them became even frightening for us. And this feeling of fright and helplessness brings back to us the interest for easier and friendlier mechanisms – namely watch circles and wheels. The primary aim to measure time has become secondary for modern watches. “Our watches are alive”, say watchmakers when they asked why mechanical movements are better than quartz. And these words might seem a complete heresy to a Christian from Middle Ages.
As a matter of fact watches are neither dead nor alive. They are just models of our limited closed world. When people aspire to progress they believe in science. But when the future is just one more variation of present they star to get interested in magic and mystics. Creating complicated movements people do not reach some result. May be that’s why the symbol of new watchmaking is a tourbillon – a device which is always rotating but never shows anything.
Practical sceptics call mechanical watch a useless toy. A toy – yes, but definitely not useless. It is just an attempt to experiment with those cards of existence that were dealt round to us. Our world is a closed rotating sphere. And being aware of it we ourselves become to be cycled. Making watches more and more complicated we prove to ourselves that even an eternally repeated rotation may be interesting. And a mechanical watch is a symbol of reality and not of a totalitarian idea.
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