I have always admired men who work with their hands. Perhaps it is because I cannot do so. I am always buried in my books at our little city’s small library, and thus I have developed soft hands, without callouses, a loss to the rude mechanicals of the world.
I feel no shame in this, since we are not all born to work in one way or the other, whether with our hands or our minds. Born as we are, we cannot help but to be what we are. There is honor in every life and every profession, or at least most of them, even my own, though the number of those who can appreciate my work is small. Anyone can appreciate a well-made chair or a well-laid brick, but only those who live the life of the mind alone can sing my praises.
I am most fascinated, however, by those liminal craftsmen, those who are somewhere in between, who work with neither their hands nor their minds to the exclusion of the other, because their vocation entails some measure of both. These are men without calloused hands, but make no particular use of the abstract intellect, their minds preoccupied instead with the practical considerations of their trade: Jewelers, for example, or those who clean paintings or set type.
I believe the most honorable of these artisans is the watchmaker, if only because of the immense skill required for such fine and delicate handiwork, which is so miniscule and detailed that it can only be accomplished with a microscope. Combine this in turn with the watchmaker’s knowledge of the mathematical secrets of gears and tumblers; matched only by that of the locksmith or the safecracker.
The watchmaker who springs to my mind was quite old. Well into the shadow years of his life, he had occupied the same tiny storefront on one of the main streets of our little city for decades, squeezed between two much larger establishments, which had changed hands innumerable times. They were shoe stores, clothing boutiques, tobacconists, haberdashers, cafes, and so on, in endless revolution as the years passed, since businesses change hands with great ease in our little city. Failure at commerce is the norm among us, and yet there are always more than a few willing to hurl themselves into it again. So, the metropolis upturns and overturns itself. It changes its face and form, and in short order becomes unrecognizable even to a late arrival such as myself.
The watchmaker had sat in his monastic cell for decades, surrounded by contraptions and arcane instruments of his trade, while our little city and with it the country and the world heaved and swelled up around him with little in the way of consolation or compassion. These greater things moved, as nature does, with ruthless momentum into the future. The watchmaker must have known our little city when it had been truly little, a mere collection of structures on a rocky beach, driven into the uncertain crimson sand. Now it has skyscrapers and highways, proofs of growth and prosperity, though it yet remains diminutive before the great cities, the urban beasts that blight the world.
The first thing I noticed about the watchmaker was his hands. They were very pale, almost alabaster white and transparent, with long and slender fingers that tapered toward the end, yet they were muscular and exercised from long practice at the most delicate tasks. His shoulders were hunched from the years bent over his tiny instruments; his bushy, very old-fashioned moustache had long since turned white; and a pair of glasses always hung from a string around his neck or sat perched at the end of his stubby nose as he examined some malfunctioning timepiece. Then he would remove the glasses and peer at the tiny mechanism through a microscope, and the slender white fingers would take up their implements. He would adjust and manipulate until he was satisfied and the gears turned as he wished, in conformity with the turning of the Earth and its orbit around the sun. This was how he spent the hours and days and years marked by his timepieces.
There was nothing else that distinguished the man, except a long, thick scar that ran down the side of his hand, past the wrist, and ended a few inches from his left elbow. I do not know what could have caused such an injury, but he made no attempt to conceal it. Through the long and interminable summers in our little city, he often worked with the sleeves of his white collared shirt—tieless and unbuttoned, as was the style in earlier times—rolled up above his elbows, so all who wished or did not wish to see the remains of his wound could do so.
I wondered if anyone ever inquired as to how it occurred, but if they did, I never heard of it. I chose not to do so myself, perhaps out of minor cowardice, because one never knows how people will react when questioned as to history, and what possible monsters such an inquiry might awake. Nonetheless, it is most probable that, if I had asked, he would have told me, and that would have been the end of it. But I did not ask.
In fact, I almost never conversed with the watchmaker about anything. We spoke more or less in banalities, exchanging a few words about my request and his available resources, but nothing more. Even when I chose to sit on the cracked wooden stool in the corner and wait for him to complete some minor repair, we said not a word to each other. He seemed not unfriendly but uninterested, and the close atmosphere that prevailed in the tiny shop—because he had never invested in an air conditioner, with only a pair of fans to relieve us from the blast furnace heat of our long summers—left me too lethargic to force him into conversation. To do so felt, in a way, uncivilized.
On one of those sweaty summer afternoons in our little city, however, the watchmaker took longer than usual. I watched him bent over his instruments as sweat poured down his face and soaked the back of his shirt, and ventured to ask him the question that sprang to mind.
“Tell me,” I said, “why do you still do this? At your age, it would be easy enough to retire, claim your pension, and leave all this discomfort behind.”
“Yes,” he replied, and did not look up from his work. “I suppose that’s true, but it isn’t that simple.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“You see,” he said, “if I cease repairing watches, I believe time will stop.”
I did not know what to say in response to such an unexpected statement. After a long moment of silence, I could only ask, “Really?”
“Oh yes,” he replied. “I’m certain of it. Absolutely certain.”
“Have you always felt this way?”
“From the very beginning.”
I thought for a moment, then said, “But it’s impossible, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “No one knows anything about time. Not really. It’s a great mystery, to me above all.”
“Do you mean everything will just… stop?”
“Yes, people will freeze in place, like statues, in whatever position or posture they were in at the moment it happened. The earth and the planets will stop revolving. The stars will stop twinkling. Light will cease to travel. The moon will be still in the sky. The waves of the ocean will not move. Even the tiniest atom will stay just as it was and all things will stay just as they are. And it will be forever. Nothing will ever move again. But as long as I keep working, it won’t happen.”
“But what about when you die?” I asked, without a thought given to the intimacy of the question. “Won’t everything stop then?”
“I’ve thought about that a lot,” he replied. “More than you can imagine. After all, it’s a very important job that I have, to keep everything going. Eventually, I decided that it’s very unlikely I’m the only one. There’s probably other watchmakers, all over the world, and we keep things going, without even knowing who we are. Even if I am the only one, there’s probably someone who will take over when I die. I mean, time went on before me, so there must have been others in the past, each taking over for the other, since long before I was born, so there’ll certainly be others in the future.”
“Yes,” I said, “that makes sense.”
“It’s logical,” he agreed. He sighed and continued in a quiet voice, “I won’t lie to you, it’s a very heavy burden. The whole world depends on it. I’m sure the others feel the same way, whoever they are.”
He set down his tools and looked up at me for the first time. “There you are,” he said, and handed me my watch. “It should keep time now. That’s the most important thing: To keep time.”
I felt the slight vibration in my hand as the timepiece ticked away the seconds.
“The only problem,” he went on, “is that time keeps passing, and we’re always running to keep up. But we don’t choose how the world is. If we could, I’m sure we’d choose something else. I know I would. Wouldn’t you?”
He looked very serious, as if a great deal depended on my answer. I thought for a moment and then said, “I don’t know. I’m sorry, I wish I had a better answer.”
“Well,” he said, “we don’t get to choose our answers either. It’s all about keeping the thing going. That’s all that really matters.”
He left me with those words, and when I stepped out into the heat of the day, I looked around at the world. I saw people who were on their way to who knows where, because there are so many places to go in our little city. I saw the cars and cabs go by. A plane flew overhead and left its white trail behind. The faint sound of its engines vibrated in the air. I looked back and saw through the window that the watchmaker was again bent over his desk, his instruments enmeshed in another mechanism.
Almost a year later, I walked by his little shop and found it closed, the windows boarded up and a sign hung in the window. It said that an establishment dedicated to gourmet French pastries would open in the near future. As I had the last time, I looked around at the world. This time, I wondered, just for a moment, if it would stop. But it did not. People still went on their way, the cars and cabs went by, a plane flew overhead. All was as it had always been. The world turned. Nothing had happened.
I assume that the watchmaker retired or, more likely, died, because he was not the type to retire, not a man dedicated with such fervor to his mission, and with such a proud and unbowed sense of duty. If we entertain his theory, we must conclude that, since the world goes on as it always has, he was right, and others unknown to him have taken up the charge.
If so, I hope they keep to their task, though their sacrifice will remain a mystery, unappreciated until whatever end may come. It is strange that, even as they sustain us, they propel us toward that end, which both the scientists and the theologians assure us is impossible to avoid. The argument could be made, in fact, that it would be better if time stopped. But that is inconceivable. Without time, we would be mere shadows before the great hearth. Time is the price we pay, and it falls to the few, who live in secret and in silence, to pay it.
If this is true, then we owe all to the watchmakers, strangers to us and to themselves. Are they not, though they and we do not know it, the most beloved of us all?