Preamble To The Instructions On How To Wind a Watch<\/u><\/p>\n
Think of this: when they present you with a watch, they are gifting you with
a tiny flowering hell, a wreath of roses, a dungeon of air. They aren’t
simply wishing the watch on you, and many more, and we hope it will last
you, it’s a good grand, Swiss, seventeen rubies; they aren’t just giving
you this minute stonecutter which will bind you by the wrist and walk along
with you. They are giving you – they don’t know it, it’s terrible that they
don’t know it – they are gifting you with a new fragile and precarious piece
of yourself, something that’s yours but not a part of your body, that you
have to strap to your body like your belt, like a tiny, furious bit of
something hanging onto your wrist. They gift you with the job of having to
wind it every day, an obligation to wind it, so that it goes on being a
watch, they gift you with the obsession of looking into jewelry-shop windows
to check the exact time, check the radio announcer, check the telephone
service. They give you the gift of fear, someone will steal it from you,
it’ll fall on the street and get broken. They give you the gift of your
trademark and the assurance that it’s a trademark better than others, they
gift you with the impulse to compare your watch with other watches. They
aren’t giving you a watch, you are the gift, they are giving you yourself
for the watch’s birthday.<\/p>\n
Instructions On How to Wind a Watch<\/u><\/p>\n
Death stands there in the background, but don’t be afraid. Hold the watch
down with one hand, take the stem in two fingers, and rotate it smoothly.
Now, another installment of time opens, trees spread their leaves, boats
run races, like a fan time continues filling with itself, and from that
burgeon of air, the breezes of earth, the shadow of a woman, the sweet smell
of bread.<\/p>\n
What did you expect, what more did you want? Quickly, strap it to your
wrist, let it tick away in freedom, imitate it greedily. Fear will rust
all the rubies, everything that could happen to it and was forgotten is
about to corrode the watch’s veins, cranking the cold blood with its tiny
rubies. And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive
beforehand and understand it’s already unimportant.<\/p>\n
From \"The Instruction Manual\" by Julio Cortazar
<\/strong>(and thanks to Sister Amos for sending it to me)<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Preamble To The Instructions On How To Wind a Watch Think of this: when they present you with a watch, they are gifting you witha tiny flowering hell, a wreath of roses, a dungeon of air. They aren’tsimply wishing the watch on you, and many more, and we hope it will lastyou, it’s a good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}