ELECTRONICALLY REPRINTED FROM MARCH 20, 2017

PERSONAL HISTORYTIME OUT
Confessions of a watch geek.
BY GARY SHTEYNGART

In October, my feelings of dread spiked, so I decided to buy a Rolex.
segmenting
A feeling. Time was not working atintoa time—Jabruarch—or
Gregorian-calendar city-states.
t the start of 2016, I had a badright. Some weeks were as snappy asdays, others were as elastic as months,
and the months felt as if they were either bleeding into one another threeFeb. Rue. Airy. Something was wrong
with the world.
One day in February, I took a rideon the subway. This was a rare occur-

rence. Since turning forty, I’d started tosuﬀer from a heightened sense of claustrophobia. A few years ago, I was stuck
for an hour in an elevator with a man
who weighed about three hundred andﬁfty pounds and his two grocery carts
crammed with bags of Tostitos and bottles of Canada Dry, an experience bothfrightening and lonely. The elevator had
simply given up. What if a subway train
also refused to move? I began walking
seventy blocks at a time or splurging on
taxis. But on this day I had taken the
N train. Somewhere between Fortyninth Street and Forty-second Street, asignal failed and we ground to a halt.
For forty minutes, we stood still. An old
man yelled at the conductor at full volume in English and Spanish. Time andspace began to collapse around me. Theorange seats began to march toward
each other. I was no longer breathingwith any regularity. This is not going to
end well. None of this will end well. We
will never leave here. We will always be
underground. This, right here, is the restof my life. I walked over to the conductor’s silver cabin. He was calmly explaining to the incensed passenger the scopeof his duties as an M.T.A. employee.
“Sir,” I said to him, “I feel like I’m dying.”“City Hall, City Hall, we got a sickpassenger,” he said into the radio. “I repeat, a sick passenger. Can you send a
rescue train?”
A rescue train. My whole life I havebeen waiting for one. Sensing the excitement of someone suﬀering morethan they were, the other passengers
moved to my end of the car to oﬀer
advice, crowding in on me and making me panic all the more. One man
was particularly insistent. “I’m a retired
ﬁreﬁghter,” he said. “I’ve been doing
this twenty years, folks. Seen it all. Thisman here is hyperventilating. That’s
what he’s doing. Twenty years a ﬁre­ﬁghter, now retired.”“I’m going to take an Ativan now,”
I said, ﬁshing a pill out of my breast
pocket.
“Do not do that,” the retired ﬁre­ﬁghter said. “It will only make you hyperventilate more. Trust me, I knowwhat I’m doing.”
A middle-aged woman approached
me. “You have to imagine,” she said tome, in a Polish accent, “that eventually
the train will move. That eventually wewill come out of the tunnel.”
Shamed into not taking the Ativan
by the retired ﬁreﬁghter, I looked downat my wrist. I was wearing a new watch,the ﬁrst mechanical watch I had everowned. A brief primer: Since the latenineteen-seventies, most watches haveused a quartz movement, which is battery-powered and extremely accurate.
Mechanical watches, by contrast, arepowered either by hand-winding or, inthe case of an automatic watch, by the
motion of the wearer’s wrist, which isconverted into energy by means of arotor. Mechanical watches are far lessaccurate than quartz watches, but often
far more expensive, because their bearings are more intricate. All contemporary Rolex watches, for example, are mechanical. The diﬀerence between quartz
and old-fashioned mechanical is thatyour child’s Winnie the Pooh watch will
likely keep better time than a seventy-­
six-thousand-dollar Vacheron Constantin perpetual calendar in rose gold. A
quick way to tell the two kinds apart isto look at the second hand. On a quartz
watch, the second hand goose-steps along
one tick at a time; on a mechanical watch,
it glides imperfectly, but beautifully,
around the dial and into the future.
Looking at the smooth, antiquatedmechanical glide of my watch’s second
hand, I felt, if not calm, then ready forwhatever happened next. As the conductor’s radio ﬂared on and oﬀ with promises from City Hall (my rescue train nevercame), as the passengers around me discussed my fate, I wondered: Can you
hold your own world together while thegreater world falls apart? The visible passing of time, second by second, seemed
to provide a kind of escape route, evenas my body remained within the metalshell of the stricken N train. Three seconds, inhale. Three seconds, exhale. The

watch was a Junghans, from Germany,
derived from a design by the Bauhausinﬂuenced Swiss architect, artist, andindustrial designer Max Bill. I had bought
it at the MOMA shop for what in my early,
innocent watch days seemed like the astronomical price of a thousand dollars.
Its no-frills, form-follows-function shapeevoked civility in a time of chaos, a ticking intelligence in the face of a new inhumanity. The train slowly moved again.
The Polish woman smiled at me. We
shuddered into Times Square and I was,for a few moments in time, safe.

E story. During childhood, my ﬁrst

very watch geek has an origin

best friend was a watch, a Casio H-108
12-Melody-Alarm. True to its name,the digital watch played twelve melodies, including “Santa Lucia,” “Happy
Birthday,” “The Wedding March,” “Jingle Bells” (played only in the bathroomof my Hebrew school, when no otherJewish boys were present), and even asong from my native Russia, “Kalinka”(roughly, “Red Little Berry”), which I
listened to every hour on the hour tomake myself feel less homesick andscared. I spoke English miserably, but
the watch had its own language, a computerese series of squeaks issuing froma tiny Japanese speaker to form passable melodies. My parents had boughtme the watch at a Stern’s department
store in Queens for $39.99, a signiﬁcant part of their net worth at the time,and it was easily my favorite possession, until it caught the eye of a Hebrewschool bully. My grandmother marched
into the principal’s oﬃce and used thehundred or so English words at her
disposal—“Bad boychik take watch!”—to lobby for its safe return.
Eventually, I made human friends,
and my musical Casio disappeared forgood. My relationship with watchesfrom that point on coincided with thewomen in my life. In high school, mymother bought me a quartz Seiko,which pinched my budding wrist hairwith its loose gold-plated bracelet, andwas a bit out of place at my next stop,
Oberlin, where comrades were not encouraged to have gold-plated things.
After college, a girlfriend bought me
a Diesel watch with the image of atleast six continents on its dial, to indi-cate just how “worldly” I was, and asubsequent girlfriend had it repaired
after we had broken up, a gesture ofunusual kindness.
But by this time I thought of myself
as a writer, and, for a writer, the money
you make can be traded in for your creative independence, hence one is permanently building a rainy-day fund.
I have always tried to keep on handenough cash to cover at least two yearsof expenses in case the public stops being
interested in my work, while plowing
the rest into low-cost index funds. Thrift
was comforting; material goods uninteresting, bordering on gauche.
And yet on April 12, 2016, I walked
out of the Tourneau TimeMachine
store, on Madison Avenue and Fifty-­
seventh Street, with a receipt for$4,137.25 and a new Nomos Minimatik Champagner on my wrist, the sales
clerks bidding me farewell with acheerful cry of “Congratulations!”
By the standards of luxury watches,
the amount I spent was small indeed(an entry-level Rolex is about six thousand dollars), but by my own standards
I had just thrown away a small chunk,roughly 4.3 writing days, of my independence. And yet I was happy. The
watch was the most beautiful object I
had ever seen. After my panic attackon the subway, the urge for another
Bauhaus-inspired watch had become
overwhelming, and I compared many
brands. The winner was a relatively
new watchmaker called Nomos, basedin the tiny Saxon town of Glashütte.
An early-spring sun glinted oﬀ mywatch as I walked down Lexington Avenue. I took a photograph of the Minimatik on my wrist, as if at any moment I would be forced to give it back.
There is an entire genre of watch aﬁcionados who take photos of themselves
wearing their timepieces in front of
landmarks and post them on watch forums. Would I become one of them?
I ducked into a Pakistani place to eat
a quail, but was worried about splashing grease on the vegetable-tanned natural-leather strap. The dial was champagne-colored, with an unexpectedcircle of neon orange around the seconds’ subdial. (“These are wild colors
but in homeopathic doses,” one of Nomos’s marketing texts reads.) The Min-

imatik’s lugs—the four parts that extend from the case and connect thewatch to either a strap or a bracelet—
were contoured and feminine, as was
the gently domed sapphire crystal, asharp rebuke to the dinner-plate aesthetic you see on so many watches
meant for men. Nomos does not market its watches to either gender—theirrelatively small size is meant both for
women and for men with nothing toprove. The hour markers were pearled,
and milled into the champagne dial topick up its brass hue. The watch seemed
to absorb and reﬂect light in its own
way, storing it under its arched sapphire, making it golden.
I took the watch oﬀ and turned it
over. Some of the more interesting
watches have an exhibition-case back,allowing you to see the inner workings.
The Nomos calibre, assembled almost
entirely from hundreds of minusculeparts made in Germany, is a riot of sunburst decoration, tempered blue screws,
and a small constellation of rubies. A
tiny golden balance wheel spins backand forth, regulating the time (think ofa pendulum swinging on a grandfather
clock, but at a tremendously fast clip),and this action, to many viewers, gives
the watch the appearance of being alive.
It is not uncommon for some watch enthusiasts to call this part of the watch
its “heart,” or even its “soul.” The Nomos
was not a quartz watch built by robots
in a giant Asian factory. A German man
or woman with real German problems
had constructed this piece, blue screw
by blue screw.
I was obsessed. And I had time toindulge my obsession. I believe that anovelist should write for no more thanfour hours a day, after which returns
truly diminish; this, of course, leaves
many hours for idle play and contemplation. Usually, such a schedule resultsin alcoholism, but sometimes a hobby
comes along, especially in middle age.
For us so-called W.I.S., or Watch Idiot
Savants, all roads led to one Internet
site: Hodinkee, the name being a slightly
misspelled take on hodinky, the Czech
word for “watch.” Hours of my days were
now spent refreshing the site, looking atelaborate timepieces surrounded by wrist
hair and Brooks Brothers shirt cuﬀs, andlearning an entirely new language andnomenclature. By this point, it was becoming clear that Donald Trump would
be the Republican nominee. Hodinkee
became a natural refuge, a place where
I could watch videos of celebrity Watch
Idiot Savants talking about their obsession in terms that made me feel less obsessive myself. The rapper Pras, of Fugees fame: “I think about my watches.
Like when I get up in the morning.”

membered all those old Soviet-era Russians humming math problems in theirheads or playing twelve hours of competitive chess with themselves. In a society hopeless and cruel, the particularand the microscopic were the only things
that could still prove reliable.
Clymer is preternaturally calm andsumptuously bearded, a self-described“old soul,” who ticks as reliably as a chronometer granted the all-important Geodinkee is the brainchild of Ben neva Seal. The origin story of his watch
Clymer, a thirty-four-year-old obsession begins with a grandfather hewatch impresario. In the outside world, called Papa, whose urbane New Yorkno one really understood me, or the tastes he admired as a kid growing up
value of tempered blue screws. My in snowy suburban Rochester, and whose
sister-in-law pointed out, not incor- gift to his grandson of an Omega Speedrectly, that I might be suﬀering a mid- master “inspired me to do the whole
life crisis. But, in Watch World, you thing.” Clymer also started out withenter a room and everybody wants to what has been called “the collecting
discuss micro-rotors with you. As Cara gene.” He wore a Volkswagen Beetle
Barrett, one of the few women writers costume for his ﬁfth birthday and colon Hodinkee’s staﬀ, told me, “Micro-­ lected old Bakelite rotary phones, whichrotors are pretty damn adorable.”he bought at ﬁfty cents apiece. His perAt Hodinkee’s headquarters, which sonal collection of watches is impresoccupy a loft space in Nolita, every ob- sive—for example, a gold Patek Philippe
ject is tasteful, much like the twenty-­ with the Golden Rule inscribed on its
some mostly young people working dial, which Lyndon Johnson gave to his
there. In addition to publishing the allies and underlings—and he has likely
most passionate watch journalism on made a small fortune from buying andthe Web (and the most incensed read- selling timepieces over the years, buters’ comments), the site sells its own he’s also harnessed nostalgia in a way
watchbands and vintage watches. Ho­ that feels real.
dinkee’s statistics reﬂect the often
Hodinkee’s inﬂuence is felt throughrareﬁed world of watch collecting. The out the watch industry. Clymer has
average visitor has an income of three helped Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Z pickhundred thousand dollars, owns ﬁve to out their wrist wear ( Jay Z wanted “theseven watches, and buys two or three least rapper watch possible”). The
more a year at an average cost of seven shrinking size of some of the more inthousand dollars each.
triguing watches for men can, arguably,
I spoke with Clymer at Hodinkee’s be traced back to Hodinkee and its
oﬃces. After I launched into a long so- assault on what some in the watch
liloquy on a certain Zenith gold-ﬁlled world call “penis-extenders”—thosechronograph, he said to me, “Wow, you’re overwrought testosterone timepieces
in deep.” I took this as a huge compli- pumped out by newer brands likement, but it was also a sign of how my Hublot, but also by old stalwarts likelife was unravelling. Hillary Clinton had Patek and Rolex. If you want a watch
just collapsed at the 9/11 ceremony, that looks like a Russian oligarch justFiveThirtyEight was showing the elec- curled up around your wrist and died,tion tightening, and my shrink—also a you might be interested in the latest
watch nut—had just been telling me model of Rolex’s Sky-Dweller.
about the toll the election was takings the election approached, Ion his patients. Yes, I was in deep, but
started going to meetings of theweren’t we all? A dear friend of mine
who lives in Putin’s Russia collects high- Horological Society of New York. On
end shaving supplies. He once spent the streets of Manhattan, I never havepart of a visit to New York on the trail any idea which celebrity is which—theyof some kind of badger-hair brush. I re- all seem to be Matt Damon—but at theHAHorological Society I could identify all
my new heroes, many with full, Portlandian beards, across the vast hall of
the library of the General Society of
Mechanics and Tradesmen, in midtown,
while they waited in line for their freecoﬀee and Royal Dansk butter cookies.
There was the nattily dressed Kiran
Shekar—yes, the Kiran Shekar, notedcollector, author, and proprietor of the
independent watch purveyor Contrapante. I ran over to introduce myself
and a few moments later he gave me
his watch to hold, and a few weeks later
he arranged for me to attend the secret
RedBar, a meeting of the watch elect,
at a bar in Koreatown. You need a regular to invite you to a meeting, and theidea that I could be welcomed into thisexclusive world kept me from sleeping.
I lay in bed practicing what I might say
about “perlage,” “three-quarter plates,”
and the rare lapis-lazuli dials on someseventies Rolex Datejusts.
At the gathering of the RedBar Crew,
there was a Brooklyn watchmaker’s apprentice from Australia, a woman from
Latin America carefully taking picturesof a prized Rolex Daytona, a guy from
Helsinki with his own brand of massive watches, and a young man with ahundred-and-ﬁfty-dollar Citizen. No
watch is rejected here, and there is nohierarchy. Just as at the Horological Society, the attendees skew young, a surprise considering youth’s supposed slavishness to all things digital, and there
are a growing number of women—RedBar’s chief operating oﬃcer is the collector Kathleen McGivney. There wasa boozy meat-market scene in the restof the bar, which was ﬁlled with loudmusic and twentysomething Koreanson the make. But, in the section reserved
for the W.I.S. crowd, we sipped whiskey as we stripped oﬀ our watches inour small brightly lit safe space. I threw
my Nomos on a long covered table andan exuberantly bearded dude pawed at
it while I got my hands on a cheap but
sturdy Seiko diver and an “honest”
Omega Speedmaster. Swiss luxury
watches may be made with the one percent in mind, but true aﬁcionados knowthat the hegemony of the Swiss is over;some of the most interesting watches
now come from German brands like
Nomos and A. Lange and Japan’s Grandmonth from one month to the next. A
year isn’t.” I looked into the reassuring
deep blue of my old Rolex. I’m familiar with the concept of leap years, ofcourse, but Forster was saying that noone month, year, minute, hour is exactly, perfectly equivalent to any other.
n October, my feelings of dread What hope do we have of regulating
spiked, and so I decided to buy a our lives, if time itself is an unsturdy,
Rolex. Not a new one, of course, but possibly political construct?
something vintage—in this case, an Air“There’s something very mournful
King from the seventies. I spotted one about watches,” Forster told me, afteron the site of a dealer from Boston. It the lecture. When I got home, I checked
had a perfect “bluejean” dial and well-­ my Air-King and Nomos and Jungpreserved hands, and a brown leather hans against the atomic clock of time.
strap that I knew would contrast per- gov. The Nomos had lost ﬁve seconds
fectly with the blue dial, as if my whole in the previous twenty-four hours, theworld were just cool and casual and ev- Junghans close to ten, and the Rolex
erything was going to be O.K. After it had gained ﬁfteen. It took an averagearrived, I got in touch with Eric Wind, of three timepieces to tell the actual
one of the top watch experts at Chris- time. We were using watches to calcutie’s, who told me that the dial was in- late our own demise, and we weren’t
deed rare and the hands “extraordinary.” even doing it accurately.
But, as I suspected, the case had been
A few days later, over oysters andoverpolished, because the lugs were too gluten-free Martinis, I pressed Forster
sharp and thin. (“Thick, beefy lugs” is a on what I could do to end my expenmantra for watch collectors; and most sive new hobby. He shrugged and swalwould prefer a scuﬀed “honest” case over lowed a bivalve. Of collectors, he said,
something buﬀed and shiny.) Still, Wind “There’s some pocket of rot in the oakvalued the watch at about six hundred of their soul that can only be patchedand ﬁfty dollars more than I’d paid for up by watches.”
it—my ﬁrst potential proﬁt as a Watch
fter Trump won, I went to GerIdiot Savant.
I started looking at the Air-King’s
many—speciﬁcally, to Glashütte, infrantic second hand for hours, and lis- the remote Müglitz Valley, in Saxony,
tening to its serious ticking, which between Dresden and Prague, where mysounded like a surly boxer before the ﬁrst Nomos Minimatik was born. The jourround. When I was a kid, in the eight- ney from Dresden by suburban train
ies, Rolex was shorthand for “yuppie.” took me past churches and boxy G.D.R.To console myself that I had not become era dachas, a perfect Russian motif for
one, I thought of all the rap lyrics fea- a city that once hosted the budding
turing the brand. “Girl you look ﬁne / like K.G.B. spy Vladimir Putin. Glashütte,a wide-face Rolex, you just shine,” Big- where German watchmakers began
gie Smalls rapped on “Fuck You Tonight.” working in the nineteenth century, is“They took my rings, they took my now home to at least eight companies.
Rolex,” Warren G commiserates with The town, surrounded by the Ore MounNate Dogg on “Regulate.” “I looked at tains, appears suddenly, its train platthe brotha, said ‘Damn, what’s next?’ ” form hugged by buildings of cement,
At a lecture that Jack Forster, Ho­ steel, and glass. Glashütte does not havedinkee’s editor-in-chief, gave at the so much as a proper restaurant, although
Horological Society, a photograph of every Tuesday a chicken man comes witha lonely Antarctic research station a truck full of roasting birds, and penﬂashed on the projection screen. Speak- sioners dutifully line up as if the Berlin
ing of its inhabitants, Forster said, “In Wall had never fallen.
“Caring for machines is as essential
Antarctica, there is no time except fromthe civilization that sent them there.” as caring for yourself,” an old East GerHe went on to discuss the very subjec- man poster proclaims in one of Notivity of time. “A month is not the same mos’s workspaces. The company operSeiko. I missed out on the culminationof the evening, when all the watches
were piled up for an Instagram photowith the hashtag #sexpile, but as I wandered into the autumn night my Nomos
beat warmly against my wrist.

IAneomatik from NOMOS Glashütte: Watches with the automatic movement of
the next generation. Incredibly slender, highly precise—and now available atselected retailers. Find Minimatik champagner and other NOMOS models at
nomos-glashuette.com, nomos-store.com.

ates out of Glashütte’s old train station,
and also a well-kept building stuﬀed
with the latest Vitra furniture, situatedon a hill overlooking the town. (Thereis also a design bureau in Berlin, on
the Landwehr Canal.) The watches
are marketed not to the one per centbut to the creative classes. “If an editor’s career is on the rise,” a German
publishing friend said, “they’ll get a
Nomos.”“Too many Swiss watch companies
have become M.B.A.’d and are run like
Procter & Gamble,” the watch collector Kiran Shekar had told me in New
York. Nomos is the opposite of that.
And there is a political element, too.
Saxony has not been immune to theracist stirrings of the Alternative für
Deutschland party, challenging Angela
Merkel’s ruling coalition. When an
AfD march was planned for Glashütte,the company put up a sign reading, inGerman, “We tick internationally. No
to right-wing propaganda. Yes to tolerance and cosmopolitanism, and topeople who need our help now.”
Visiting a watch manufactory is asoothing experience during chaotic
times, and the painfully slow assemblyof these beautiful objects may well fallunder the heading of “God’s work.” At
the Nomos workshop, a monastic silence prevailed as men and women(there are more of the latter than theformer) sat at desks, wearing whatlooked like pink ﬁnger condoms andsifting through parts, some of themthinner than a human hair. The work
is diﬃcult and takes a toll. Because theirhands need to be steady, watchmakers
cannot drink profusely. According toNadja Weisweiler, who works for theGerman retailer and watch manufacturer Wempe, they are encouraged totake up musical instruments or horseback riding. I observed with special delight as a watchmaker inserted a balance wheel into a new watch, and itcame to life for the ﬁrst time.
At Nomos, the dignity of work is
still celebrated, and the company provides an example of what a creative
manufacturing workplace can look likeat a time when making things is rarely
the province of humans. Nomos’s design bureau, in Berlin, is light-ﬁlled andcheery. The minimally bearded design-

ers turn to everyday objects for inspiration. “We’re recoding heritage with
contemporary inﬂuences from Berlin,”
one of them told me. The neon orangethat adds such cosmopolitan charm to
my Minimatik, for example, came fromthe orange of warning signs seen intechnical instruments and on the streetsof the city. The avant-garde fonts forthe numbers on the dial are stretchedand opened up for better legibility. The
intelligence of the design never proclaims the watch to be anything morethan an instrument. “We know there
are more important things thanwatches,” Judith Borowski, the company’s chief brand oﬃcer, said. “Like people suﬀering around the world.”
Nomos is doing well. The company’s sales increased by more than twenty
per cent over the previous year, while
the Swiss watch industry is suﬀering,in part because of the decline of several important markets, such as China
and Russia, and, at a certain level, thepreponderance of smart watches likeApple’s. Because Nomos aims for ayounger demographic, its C.E.O., Uwe
Ahrendt, is optimistic. “The good thing
about smart watches is that young people started caring about their wrists
again,” he told me in Glashütte. “They’ll
start oﬀ with a smart watch and thenthey’ll switch to mechanical.”After visiting Nomos, I crossed theroad to A. Lange & Söhne. Ferdinand
Adolph Lange, the godfather of German watchmaking, founded the company in 1845, as part of a Saxon king’s
anti-poverty measures. The region was
chieﬂy known for mining, but it wasalso famous for basket-weaving, andthe dexterity required for that was used
to make precise ticking things. Afterthe Second World War, the Soviets nationalized the company and carted thebest equipment oﬀ to Russia. Walter
Lange, the great-grandson of Ferdinand, was about to be conscripted towork in an East German uranium mine,when he ﬂed to the West. In 1990, after
the Wall fell and when Lange was sixty-six years old, he returned to Glashütte
and brought the company back to life.
The new watches were soon beloved,
especially by collectors who didn’t careabout Lange’s pricing (entry-level
Langes start at nearly ﬁfteen thousand

dollars, which some people consider abargain).
In contrast to the freewheeling
Nomos, Lange has an air of secrecy andtradition. To enter the inner sanctum,
I had to surrender my phone and put
on a lab coat. Lange’s timepieces are
beautiful in an eerie way that collapses
the diﬀerences between centuries, speaking to a world interrupted and then,against all odds, resumed. The watchmakers use gold chatons with steelscrews to hold down the rubies that act
as a lubrication system for the watch.
There is absolutely no need for gold
chatons at this point—the technology
has moved on—but Lange insists on
using them.
Walter Lange died this year, at theage of ninety-two, and the success of
his company can be seen as a form ofrevenge against the totalitarian Soviet
interregnum. The results are almost perversely opulent. Parts of the mechanism
are ﬁnished by hand but are never meant
to be seen by the owner; only the watchmaker and subsequent watch repairers
will see the work in full. When I lookat the back of a Datograph, one ofLange’s more complicated watches (itfeatures a date as well as a chronograph,a kind of stopwatch), I see a small cityof silver and gold gears and wheels, aminiature three-dimensional universe
in which everyone is running to catchthe next bus. If only our own daily exertions could be so purposeful and ornate. If only watches could do what theyso slyly promise. To record. To keep
track. To bring order.

AI bought another watch. I knew Is the inauguration approached,

had to stop, but I had an excuse. I desperately needed a waterproof watch for
swimming, my only form of exercise.
By my hopeless logic, the watch would
make me healthier. I went to Wempe’s
emporium on Fifth Avenue, which isjust a few doors down from Trump
Tower, and feels like a meditation on
the calmness of wood and the serenityof the color beige. It was early in theday, but already some gentlemen had
stumbled in for their watch-­fondling.
“Tell me which watch you like and I’ll
tell you how long I have to work for it,”one man was telling his ﬁve-year-old

son. I was served an espresso and a Lindt
chocolate by a young man who also presented me with a Tudor Heritage BlackBay 36, a glowing black-dial water-resistant watch bearing the famous“snowﬂake” hour hand of Tudor (a sister company of Rolex). I bought it,
whereupon a small bottle of Veuve Clicquot was opened, and although theiconic snowﬂake hand was still two hours
short of noon, I drank it down to thelast. In total, I had now given up 10.1
days of artistic freedom to four watches
in the course of less than a year.
Hodinkee invited me to a secret eventat an undisclosed location. A black Lincoln MKT picked me up and half anhour later we arrived at a swish bar in
midtown. Meanwhile, twenty-­one of
the world’s most signiﬁcant watch collectors were making similar, if longer,
journeys, from as far away as London
and Los Angeles. They had no idea what
awaited them. At the bar, Ben Clymer
unveiled the project that Hodinkee had
been working on for more than a year.
The company had taken a famous Vacheron Constantin watch known as theCornes de Vache (its lugs are shaped
like cow horns), swapped out the platinum or the rose gold for humble steel,switched the white or silvered dial for aslate-gray one, and changed the tachymeter scale on the rim of the dial, whichmeasures distance or speed, for a pulsation scale, which helps measure the beating of the human heart.
Vacheron Constantin is a storied
Swiss maison (Napoleon wore one ofits watches). Amid the aah-ing of theaudience, I ran over to be the ﬁrst to
feel metal against ﬂesh. Collectors gathered around, taking snaps of the watch
on my wrist. The atmosphere simmeredwith the strange happiness of our little
world, the feeling of being ﬁnally at theright place, if maybe not in the righttime. The price of the watch was forty-ﬁve thousand dollars, and only thirty-six of them would be available forsale. Momentarily, I reviewed myﬁnances. What if . . .
Shortly afterward, I met with a wellknown collector and the editor of thewatch site TimeZone who goes by thenom de plume William Massena, anursine man with a strong Continental
accent and even stronger horologicalopinions (“I used to get death threats!”).
The timepieces in his collection weresubtle yet striking. As Massena showedme the gorgeous faded-­brown dial ofa Rolex Submariner, akin to a model
issued to members of the British Navy,
I told him how I had got into watchesat the start of 2016, when our nation
was vulnerable but still whole. “Ah,” hesaid, in a burst of European pragma-

tism, “but you are a little Russian émigré. You know if you need to you can
put these watches in your pocket andsneak across the border to Canada pastBuﬀalo. And you can survive.”
A memory arrived unbidden. The
year was 1978, and my family and I wereat Pulkovo Airport, in Leningrad, about
to become Soviet refugees in America.
A stern customs oﬃcer took oﬀ myfurry shapka and poked at the still warm
lining, looking for diamonds my parents might have hidden there. A sixyear-old is humiliated, but perhaps alesson is learned. What if we had stashedaway some diamonds and somehow got
them through to freedom? In talking
to collectors, I have heard the tale of a
grandfather who was able to escape Occupied France because he gave a gold
Omega to a stationmaster. Is this it,
then? Is that what my obsession is about?
I will stop buying watches. But allow
me one last purchase. It comes, via eBay,
from San Luis Potosí, a city in north-­
central Mexico. It is a Casio H-108
12-Melody-Alarm, the kind I had lostto the Hebrew-school bully and my
grandmother had reclaimed. The watch
feels small, digital, innocent. It dutifully plays all the songs I remember.
The word “HAPPY” appears in eighties
letters as the birthday song plays. And,for a moment, I am. Posted with permission from the March 20, 2017 issue of The New Yorker, Conde Nast Publications. Copyright 2017. All rights reserved.
For more information on the use of this content, contact Wright’s Media at 877-652-5295.
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