I grew up on a story about Immanuel Kant. He was said to be so punctual that the people of Königsberg set their clocks by him as he passed.
My grandad told it to my mother. My mother told it to us.
It is almost certainly not true. It reaches us mostly through Heine, who was a poet rather than a reporter, and it has been buffed by every mouth it passed through since.
Isn’t it lovely that the most famous story about punctuality and timekeeping resists the very thing both seem to promise: precision? It was handed on, improved slightly, and handed on again.
To my grandad and my mother, punctuality was never just about arriving at the agreed hour. It meant discipline. Reliability. Character. Being predictable in the good sense — the sense in which people can count on you, build something with you and around you. A person whose movements could set the clocks was a person you could trust.
I did not inherit that kind of relationship with time.
But don’t get me wrong, I love it when somebody says four and means four. When they say they will do something and then do exactly that. There is something deeply attractive about that kind of follow-through.
I have simply never managed to be that person entirely. Often, somebody, somewhere, is waiting slightly longer than I told them they would.
In my defense, I could point out that historians would probably side with me here. The idea that character can be read off a clock is not especially old; it can be traced to the factory and the foreman — the bell, the gate, the docked wages. Making punctuality mean something about a person is a fairly recent learned behavior.
But what really delighted me on this little expedition into luxury watches was not the historians. It was discovering that the people who take watches most seriously — those building and buying some of the finest watches on Earth — seem, in their own extremely elaborate way, to agree with me too.
Elaborate, and expensive. Swiss, mostly. At prices I will not be typing here.
Huh, I thought. Maybe I have not been getting this entirely wrong.
Now, I should say plainly where I’m standing, because it matters for everything after this.
I am not a watch collector. I am not a man. Almost every watch mentioned here was made for men, and I wouldn’t wear them.
(Or would I? I am increasingly suspicious that a man’s watch on a woman may work like an oversized something of his: not yours, and it shows, but wear it right, and it can be mildly sexy).
Still, I fell in love with one of these watches, before I ever saw it in person.
I found the IWC Le Petit Prince in the Style section of the Financial Times and had the extremely sophisticated reaction of: OH MY GOD, I LOVE THIS.
A watch tucked inside one of my favorite stories.
Then, not long after, there it was in my own Madrid neighborhood, in a window on Ortega y Gasset that I walked past all summer: the Little Prince on his tiny rocket, the watch sitting below him on the moon.
I took a photo.
Once the time is taken care of
As I started properly looking, I found myself following a trail: what do some of the finest watches on Earth actually do?
And almost none of them is trying to tell the time better.
Your phone does that perfectly well. Everyone making these watches knows it. Everyone buying them knows it too.
Which is where things get delightful.
Because once the hour itself has been taken care of, all that extraordinary craftsmanship seems to turn toward something else entirely. Something, in fact, much closer to the opposite.
As wonderfully ironic as it seems, the fact is, nobody is spending this kind of money to become more punctual.
And they say so themselves, which is the part I did not expect.
Watch forums are full of men explaining these purchases to one another in the language of service intervals and movement references. But every so often somebody puts the vocabulary down. One notes what everyone on the thread already knows and nobody minds: measured purely as timekeeping, a Swiss mechanical watch loses to the cheapest quartz on the shelf. Another, asked how much is too much, says that anything over five hundred dollars is money for a feeling.
Nobody argues with either of them.
So: money for a feeling. The question is which one.
A time that does not exist
The Hermès Arceau Le Temps Suspendu looks, at first, like a perfectly serious watch. A beautiful one, because Hermès.
Then you press the button at nine o’clock, and it lets go.
The hands lift away and settle into a V above the twelve, reading 11:62. A time that does not exist. The date disappears.
Underneath, nothing has stopped. The movement keeps counting faithfully in the dark, and when you press again, the hands sweep back to the correct hour as though nothing happened.
Which means somebody at Hermès took one of the most sophisticated mechanical objects we make for knowing the time and engineered into it the possibility of simply... not knowing.
At least for a few seconds.
You haven’t lost the hour. It is still there, being kept perfectly for you somewhere underneath. You have just asked not to be told.
Not stopped time, then, but unwitnessed time: the hours go on accruing in the dark, correctly, and all you have bought is the right not to be summoned by them.
And then there is Van Cleef & Arpels.
In 1751, Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who gave us much of the system we still use for naming living things, imagined a garden planted with flowers that opened and closed at different hours. Arrange them correctly and, in theory, the garden itself could tell you the time.
Van Cleef put the idea on a wrist.
Twelve flowers sit on the dial, opening and closing throughout the day. To know the hour, you have to count how many are open.
You cannot tell it at a glance. You have to look. Really look, and count. Stay there a second longer than you meant to.
Which may be the closest watchmaking gets you to ‘stop and smell the roses’.
You cannot smell them, of course. But you do stop and you do look. If only for an extra second, the watch requires you to be completely where you are.
The flowers do not decorate the time. The flowers are the time. If you close your eyes, can you smell them?
A private sky
Mo Coppoletta — a tattoo artist in London and a serious watch collector — said something to the Financial Times that made me smile, because it makes me smile when men talk like this.
He was describing a De Bethune with a night sky on the dial.
“Being a complete devotee of everything celestial, dreamy and romantic, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”
Devotee. Celestial. Dreamy. Romantic.
Doesn’t it make you smile when a man talks like that?
Plus, in a business newspaper.
De Bethune then offered him the choice of which sky he wanted on the watch.
And what he wanted only adds to my smile, because he didn’t choose the most beautiful constellation, or the most famous one. He chose his — the exact sky that was overhead on the day he was born. Which, as someone whose favorite day in the year (right up there with Christmas) is her birthday, I totally get.
Mo wears his De Bethune every year on his July birthday.
And I find that almost ceremonial. Like a little ritual of placing yourself inside something infinitely larger than you and saying: this was the cosmos when I came into it. Honoring it, yourself and your existence.
As one must, am I right?
That night happened once. The sky moved on. Everyone in it moved on.
But with this watch, you can ask for it back.
The watchmakers begin with titanium polished to a mirror and coax it into blue with heat rather than pigment. Tiny white-gold stars are set by hand into perforations of different sizes, because of course stars are not all the same size. The Milky Way is cut into the surface and finished in gold leaf.
Et voilà.
A specific sky that disappeared decades ago — your sky — made small enough to wear.
A wrist between wrists
And then, can we look at the Bulgari Monete?
An ancient coin covers the dial. On one version, a silver denarius carrying the face of Caracalla, Roman emperor from 198 to 217. On another, two coins: his father, the emperor Septimius Severus, and his mother, the empress Julia Domna. Around them, diamonds and a heavy gold chain.
In a time-is-money kind of way, you have to lift the money to get to the time.
But in this case, it is not just any money.
The coin is like this little artifact that says: yeah, I was there. I lived through eighteen hundred years of conquest, human ambition, grief, trade, love. Humans in their grandiosity and their complexity.
I saw empires emerge and disappear, languages change. Someone got paid with me. Someone saved me. Someone lost me. Someone held me up to the light and wondered whether I was enough.
With today’s technology, you could reproduce the coin almost perfectly. The metal. The weight. The worn edge. The softened profile of an emperor’s cheek.
But what you cannot reproduce is the fact that it was there.
Walter Benjamin — the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural critic — had a word for something close to this: aura. Not the woo-woo kind of aura, but the strange authority an object acquires from having existed in one particular place, through one particular stretch of time. Not because it is flawless, but simply because it was there.
And now somebody has set that little survivor into gold and diamonds and put it back against a human body.
Isn’t that like, almost mystical?
Because when you look at it, eighteen hundred years stop being just a number. And the Romans stop being just the Romans. Suddenly, there is this sort of thread connecting you.
Or like Patek Philippe puts it in its famous line running since 1996:
You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.
Just like with the coin, a fine watch can belong to you now. But its timeline doesn’t.
You are, in this existence, one wrist between wrists.
Habiller le cœur
Which brings me back to my mother.
I reread Le Petit Prince this year, in French for the first time — small yay me, dragging high-school French back into existence in my thirties — and returned to one of my favorite characters: the fox.
He asks the Little Prince to come back at the same hour every day.
If you arrive at four, he explains, then at three I will already begin to be happy. As four gets closer, I will become happier and happier.
Without an appointed hour, he would never know when to habiller le cœur.
When to dress his heart.
And isn’t that true? That sometimes all it takes is telling somebody you will arrive at four, to make three different?
I sure know it is. Four o’clock doesn’t change, but somehow it reaches backward and changes three.
Which also means that when four comes and goes, you haven’t only been late. You’ve taken somebody’s three.
That, I think, is much closer to the kind of time I understand and inhabit.
And I suspect, after all this, that it is much closer to the kind of time they understand too. The collectors. The people spending a fortune on a watch and then asking it, politely, to stop. Or to tell them the hour in flowers. Or to hand back a sky from a night they cannot possibly remember.
None of us wants the precision. Nor the perfect number that a part of us thinks we must submit ourselves to.
What we really want is to take time and grab it. To hold on to it, and play with it. To feel very small inside it, and then, briefly, enormous. And, if we get it right, to alter it a little.
We want it to stop. We make flowers tell it. We ask for that one night back. We put eighteen hundred years on a wrist. We make it for people who have not been born yet.
I think about that IWC window again. On the back of the watch, on the side nobody else sees — the side that lies against your skin — there is a small gold medallion of the Little Prince standing on his asteroid.
An extremely serious instrument for measuring time carrying, against your wrist, the little reminder that whispers: hey, you, serious adult, do not take yourself — and time — so seriously.
Perhaps the beauty of it all is that one day, if you got it right, life will teach you to say — smiling, meaning the apology, and glad of the reason: Sorry I’m late.
I was looking at the stars.