Ruffian
434
Beautiful passage. I've never read Balzac, but I've heard lots of good things.
It sounds like a pocket watch from the description. Thanks for the translation.
I have this from a more modern author, a translation from the Japanese:
'He glanced at the Heuer watch on his left wrist. It was 8:50. Passengers had begun boarding the express train. One after another, people dragged their luggage aboard, plunking themselves down in their designated seats, stowing their bags in the overhead racks, settling down in the air-conditioned cars, sipping cold drinks. He could see them through the windows of the train.
He'd inherited the watch from his father. One of the few tangible things he'd received. It was a beautiful antique, from the early 1960s. If you didn't wear it for three days, the mechanism would wind down and the hands would stop. An inconvenience, but that's what Tsukuru liked about it. It was a purely mechanical device, a piece of craftsmanship. No quartz or a single microchip inside, everything operated by delicate springs and gears. It had been working faithfully, without a rest, for a half century and was, even now, surprisingly accurate.
Tsukuru had never bought a watch himself, not once in his whole life. When he was young, someone inevitably gave him a cheap one, which he used without much thought. As long as it kept the right time, he didn't care what he wore. That was the extent of his feelings for watches. A simple Casio digital watch would do the trick. So when his father died, and he was given this expensive wristwatch as a keepsake, again it aroused no special feelings one way or the other. He had to make sure to wear it regularly, so it didn't wind down, but once he got used to this, he found he had a great fondness for the watch. He enjoyed the weight and heft of it, the faint mechanical whir it made. He found himself checking the time more often then before, and each time he did, his father's shadow passed, faintly, through his mind.'
From Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (translated by Philip Gabriel).
The passage comes from near the end of the story. The protagonist is sitting at Tokyo's Shinjuku station, reflecting on past events, including the dissipation of a group of close childhood friends, and the reasons behind it.
It's interesting how we sometimes use an object (a watch, say) and imbue it with a significance greater than itself. It becomes a talisman.
Watches in literature.
Beautiful passage. I've never read Balzac, but I've heard lots of good things.
