Horological Meandering

ripwatch
865

• Show profile
• Show other posts

No projections intended, actually...

Thomas, I wasn't projecting anything onto your words, believe it or not; I have no idea, ultimately, what your definition of perfection encompasses.  Your words, rather, were a springboard for my thoughts.  Nor was I attacking your perspective about luxury embodying a quest for perfection; rather, that perspective raises questions for which I do not have the answers.  Thus my confusion. And my post.

But I do have some idea of what perfection means to me, and that's what my post was trying (not very well, clearly) to express; essentially, to me, something that is perfect is something that cannot be improved upon.  And that's the basis for my confusion.  Perfection, defined as I have (no doubt philosophers are laughing out loud at my naivete) can and does encompass a great many things, some of them prosaic (accuracy, let's say, or reliability) and some of them quite profound (the intangible, unmeasurable but very real sense of wonder one feels upon seeing the workings of a Lange Datograph through its sapphire caseback).  Pondering how to improve upon that gives me agita.

Both, nevertheless, are elements of perfection, at least to me.  But only one of them (that ineffable wonderment) is necessarily tied to luxury.  Accuracy, reliability, boring mundane things like that, don't seem to be.  Plenty of damn-near perfect products--perfect in terms of reliability or, in the case of watches, accuracy--fall far short of luxury status.  And plenty of almost unquestionably luxury items--yes, very much including high-end watches--are far from perfect in terms of the mundane, boring, much-disparaged Consumer Reports sense of being reliable or otherwise functional (e.g. accurate).  That doesn't mean they're terrible in those respects;  they're not, obviously.  But there are plenty of cheap, ugly, decidedly non-luxury quartz watches that are far closer to perfect in this functional sense than the mechanical watches that so captivate me (and most of us participating here, I imagine). 

The Casio radio-controlled watch, to my mind, absolutely embodies a form of the quest for perfection, and yet I doubt very many people consider it a luxury item.  To restrict this to utterly non-projective terms:  I sure as hell don't consider it a luxury item!

Does my respect for the perfection of the Casio's accuracy mean that I don't like these far-from-perfect luxury items that we discuss on this site?  Of course not!  Does it mean that I value that Casio more than, say, my Calatrava?  God no!

All it means is that I wonder why, if the term"perfection" is used as part of a definition of luxury, it seems to be used so selectively.  Ultimately, therefore, I'm not sure (and God knows I'm wrestling with this--I don't have the answer) of the degree to which perfection is actually all that much a part of luxury. 

Cordially, and very imperfectly,

-Rip