The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Watch*
Series: HOROLOGICAL ABSURDIST - Untangling the beautiful absurdities of haute horlogerie.
He was a man of means, and of watches. Dozens of them, neatly arranged in mahogany drawers lined with suede. Skeletonized tourbillons that whirred like nervous insects, enamel moons swimming across aventurine skies, and complications so ornate they resembled alchemical diagrams more than instruments of time. And yet, when I asked him the simplest of questions—what time is it?—he faltered.
He raised his wrist and peered, first at one watch, then another. His brow furrowed. The hands, delicate as spider legs, dissolved against a dial alive with constellations and engravings. He squinted, tilted his head, then laughed apologetically. At last, he reached for his phone. “Easier this way,” he said.
The scene had the curious air of a neurological examination. Here was a man who could clearly see—his eyesight sharp, his collection curated with unerring taste—yet he could not recognize the most basic information his watches were meant to convey. It was not incompetence. It was something stranger, something I have come to think of as chrono-agnosia: the paradoxical inability to tell the time from the very objects designed to display it.
I have seen variations of this disorder often enough that I hesitate to call it rare. The symptoms manifest across continents, though always within the same peculiar tribe: the devotees of high horology. The watches themselves are not defective; their movements tick with exquisite precision, their cases gleam under loupe and lamp. The problem lies not in their mechanics but in their legibility. The dial, once a humble stage for hands and numerals, has been conscripted into theater. Ornament takes precedence over function, form overwhelms message.
It reminds me of patients with visual agnosia—able to see, but unable to interpret what they see. They describe outlines, colors, surfaces, yet cannot name the object before them. In a similar way, these owners can describe their watches in astonishing detail—the guilloché, the beveling of a bridge, the faint blush of a heat-blued screw—yet hesitate when asked the only question that once justified a watch’s existence: what time is it? One might liken it to prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize familiar faces: the dial is intimate, yet unreadable at a glance. Or perhaps aphasia is the closer cousin: the watch still speaks, but its language has become obscure, its grammar baroque.
This syndrome reveals itself most clearly in three patients. The first was the collector himself. The second, a maison of impeccable lineage. The third, a solitary craftsman whose genius tipped into pathology. Each, in his own way, exemplified the same estrangement from time.
The collector, whom I shall call M., was not lacking in discernment. He could discourse for hours on the provenance of enamel dials, the correct geometry of a tourbillon cage, or the subtle glint of black-polished steel. His collection—drawers upon drawers of skeletonized marvels—was curated with almost curatorial fastidiousness. Yet when asked, at dinner one evening, if the soup was being served late, he glanced at his wrist, blinked, and frowned. The hands of his watch, so finely skeletonized that they seemed to vanish, floated uncertainly over a lattice of wheels and bridges. The time could not be extracted. “I suppose it’s nearly eight,” he said, discreetly reaching for his phone. This was not ignorance. It was an affliction: a man in love with the very object that betrayed its function. His watches had become mute sculptures, relics of time rather than its keepers.
The second patient was not a man but an institution: a venerable maison with centuries of heritage, yet a distinctly modern affliction. Its catalogues spoke in luminous prose of purity, clarity, and timelessness. The watches themselves, however, resembled miniature labyrinths—dials encrusted with celestial maps, guilloché spirals, appliqués that shimmered like Byzantine mosaics. The hands, when present, often dissolved into the decoration, reduced to ornamental gestures. Executives explained this with the gravity of medical specialists: in a market crowded with rivals, differentiation was essential. Their cure for anonymity was ever more elaborate design. The irony was palpable. The clearer the brochure, the murkier the dial. Clients, persuaded by heritage and marketing, accepted the trade-off with surprising compliance. They would never admit, over champagne at a boutique launch, that they too struggled to decipher the hour. The brand thrived, while time itself quietly receded from view.
The third patient was a craftsman, a solitary genius hunched over his bench in the Jura. His affliction was not of ignorance but of brilliance unchecked. For years he had pursued horological complexity with monkish devotion: minute repeaters that chimed with crystalline delicacy, perpetual calendars that accounted for centuries, double tourbillons revolving in contrapuntal harmony. His watches were marvels of invention, but when placed on the wrist, they presented a curious problem. The dial was no longer a dial but a diagram, a technical manuscript engraved in gold and enamel. One needed a manual, a loupe, and considerable patience to decipher the hour. He did not seem to mind. “Time?” he said once, smiling faintly. “There are other ways to know it.” For him, the watch had become an essay in mechanics, a sculpture of moving parts. It told the world how clever it was, but only reluctantly, if at all, what time it happened to be.
Taken together, these three cases form a pattern too consistent to dismiss as coincidence. The collector, the brand, the watchmaker—each in his own way revealed the same paradox. The more refined the watch, the less readily it told the hour. What might appear, at first glance, as individual quirks is in truth a cultural syndrome, a pathology of luxury horology. And yet, before condemning it outright, we must consider an objection: perhaps these watches are not meant to be read at all, but contemplated, as one contemplates a painting or a piece of music.
One could argue—indeed, many do—that legibility is a pedestrian concern. A luxury watch is not a bus timetable but an objet d’art, to be admired like a miniature cathedral. Its purpose is not to announce the hour but to embody centuries of craft, to differentiate itself from its rivals, to reassure its owner that he belongs to a select fellowship of the initiated. The loss of function, in this view, is not a failure but a transformation: from tool to talisman, from instrument to icon. To demand clarity of such objects would be like scolding a symphony for failing to be a clock. They are not meant to tell time efficiently, but to make time itself feel more precious.
And so we return to the man who could not tell the time, surrounded by his treasures. His hesitation, his furtive glance at the phone, seemed less an individual failing than a parable of the age. The luxury watch, once a servant of clarity, has become a theater of obfuscation, a reliquary in which time is both preserved and concealed. To ask such a watch the hour is to pose a question it was never designed to answer directly. Instead, it replies obliquely—with beauty, with heritage, with complication, with excess. What remains, when time itself disappears behind ornament, is not uselessness but something stranger: an object that no longer measures time so much as it dramatizes our anxiety about losing it. A watch that cannot tell the time, yet insists on reminding us of its passage all the same.
Author’s Note
The following essay should be read as a fictional case study, an affectionate parody written in the style of Oliver Sacks. The “patients” described—the collector, the brand, the watchmaker—are not real individuals but composites, assembled from years of observing the curious habits and paradoxes of the watch industry. Any resemblance to actual persons, maisons, or complications is purely coincidental, though perhaps not entirely accidental.
*Title inspired by Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985)
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