Time · fiction
How much is a minute of life worth?
A story about a Portuguese watchmaker who, in 1974, repairs a soldier's watch and learns that time isn't measured by the hands of a clock.
A vision — a short story.
The watchmaker had a workshop the size of a wardrobe, on a sloping street in an old town in Portugal, and inside it fit four hundred clocks and one man.
In April 1974, on a day when the whole town seemed to be holding its breath, a very young soldier came in. He carried a pocket watch with cracked glass.
"It was my grandfather's," he said. "It stopped last night."
The watchmaker opened the case with the loupe in his eye. The mechanism was intact. Only the spring had grown tired.
"How much will it cost?" asked the soldier.
"That depends on how long you want it to run."
The young man didn't understand. The watchmaker smiled and began to work. While he worked, he talked, as he always talked to the clocks.
"Do you know what I've learned in forty years in here? That no one brings a watch to be fixed because of the time. The time is everywhere, in the church bell, on the radio, on anyone's wrist. People bring watches because of who wore them. This one doesn't tell the hours. It tells your grandfather."
The soldier was silent. Outside, someone ran past with a red carnation in hand.
While the new spring was being fitted, the watchmaker had a vision. It came the way all his visions came, through the ticking. He saw the soldier's grandfather, young, receiving that watch at a wedding, in a stone village. He saw the watch in his pocket in a factory, on a boat crossing, at a funeral. He saw it pass to the son, and from the son to the grandson, who was now there, in uniform, afraid of the day.
And he saw further. He saw a time that didn't yet exist, seventy years ahead. He saw people with no watch on their wrists at all, because the hours appeared in the air. And he saw that these people had begun to measure something else. Not the hours of the day: the minutes of life. They argued about how much a person's minute is worth, whether the minute of someone caring for a sick person is worth the same as that of someone selling a car. He saw they didn't arrive at a simple answer, and that arguing was already good, because it made everyone remember that each person's time runs out.
He came back to the workshop. The watch was ready. He wound it, and the ticking filled the little room.
"There. No charge."
"I can't accept that."
"You can. Pay another way. When you have a son, teach him to wind it. Every day, at the same hour. It's just a minute. But it's the minute in which he'll remember his great-grandfather."
The soldier put the watch in his breast pocket, on the side of his heart. He went out into the street, where people were no longer holding their breath: they were singing.
The watchmaker went back to the other four hundred clocks. Each with its spring, each with its dead, each with its minute. He listened to them all ticking at once, which from afar sounded like fine rain, and thought that time isn't what passes. It's what we give.
Bairo recalls that Steve Jobs put human life inside a number, ten seconds times millions of people. In the network he proposes, the yardstick "1 minute of human life" is one of purpose, not price. Read: Fifty-five years later.
The way forward
The time you give someone is your scarcest asset, because it doesn't come back. Choose to whom you hand your minutes with the care with which you choose a gift. And create a small daily ritual, just one minute, to remember those who came before.