The Conquest of Time
Man is the bridge between time and Timelessness,
between nothingness and eternity.
The Conquest of Time
Is time just a description, a collective hypnotism, an imaginary, nonexistent dimension? And is there an escape from its prisons? I searched for some objects having the power to win the Time and give us the scent of timelessness: an immortal piece of art, a watch which stops the time, a unique Agenda and Diary that records events and appointments before they happen can be the amulets to give protection against Cronus, The god of Time, the cruel eater of his children. These timeless objects could also provide you with an idea for an original gift to your beloved one.
A Watch to Stop the Time
The idea for this article arrived last October through an invitation to an Hermés vernissage in Milan where I learned of the Arceau watch “Le temps suspendu” that literally means “time suspended”; and that is exactly what it does. It has required years of development because they could not get it to work. Its never-seen-before feature is the pusher on the left side of the case. If you press it the hands jump to a rigid rabbit eared position…. and just stop moving. Inside the watch the movement still keeps track of the time, but you can’t see it on the dial. Press the pusher again and the time returns to normal.
One could dismiss it as a toy or an object to fidget with, but I saw in it the same root of a millennia-old quest and the symbolic fulfilment of mankind’s oldest dream: conquer time, or at least suspend it.
Ancient Greeks tried a titanic undertaking. For the first time in the history of mankind they conceived the impossible, they dreamt of a civilization capable to defeat time through art, beauty, harmony, philosophy, theatre, the cure of the body… the Art of Dreaming. Not only they never had much interest in measuring time, but they created the myth of the most horrible of all Gods, the God of Time, Cronos, devouring his own children. It a millennia-old warning carried out by this myth: “Watch out! If you are a child of time, you will be devoured by time”.
The discovery of the “time suspended” watch confirmed my deep-rooted belief that we always meet what we dream of. The concept of this watch was in an amazing sync with a timeless agenda that I had dreamed of since years and just recently was published by Sinedie Publishing for my Turkish readers and supporters. Watch and Agenda, both were based on the same paradox: objects made to deal with time, to measure and manage it, had been built with the aim to stop it and project us in a timeless dimension.
The Timeless Agenda & Diary
In the number of years that were needed for Hermés to overcoming the challenge of engineering its unique time suspended complication and marketing its novel model, I was running a parallel research for turning the traditional Agenda, the one we all know, into a revolutionary pedagogical instrument capable to teach us how to break free from the prisons of time.
The same idea expressed in the concept of a watch that paradoxically works against the time is embodied in the concept of the Timeless Agenda & Diary which has been conceived to use time to eliminate it. Week after week it makes you realize that what happens inside you, in timelessness, is the very source and fountainhead of what happens in your external reality, in time. Hence, keeping together Diary and Agenda, recording what happens in time, on the left page, and what happens inside you, on the right page, soon you will be able to record events and appointments before they happen, becoming visible. It will happen when you will realize that the people that you meet, any event and circumstance in your everyday life – on which you make a left page note – are nothing but a material reflection of your emotions, of your thoughts and feelings – on which you jot down a right page record.
We have been educated to think about our life, and talk about it, as if it were only made up of, visible, external events. In reality our existence runs along two parallel tracks: ‘events’ which are the sequence of facts and circumstances that come towards us in time, and ‘states’ which are the impulses of our spirit, moods, thoughts and emotions which are timeless and arise within us.
The quality of our external life, and all that happens to us, is the perfect reflection, the materialisation of what we feel, of our emotions, passions and thoughts, our hopes, ambitions, memories and imaginations, our fears and uncertainties and of all our sensations, attractions, desires, aversions, loves and hates which like a river flow within making us win or fail, wealthy or poor, happy or miserable.
In spurring you to record your ideas and thought, what you feel and the way you get involved and react to the events and circumstances of your life, the Timeless Agenda & Diary will foster self-discovery, the knowledge of ourselves with the aim to take control of our existence and set the direction of our destiny.
An Immortal Piece of Art
If you do not have any limit of budget, you may think of something beyond the Hermés watch and the Agenda & Diary and purchase a timeless object such as a Picasso masterpiece. His Le Reve, a 1932 oil painting, was sold at a 1997 Christie’s auction house for $48 million and more recently, in 2001, this same work of art has been bought by Steve Wynn for an undisclosed sum estimated to be over $60 million. It may appear an inexplicable mystery the attribution of such a value to a single piece of art if there is not the understanding that what Mr Wynn has really bought is not a painting but the invisibility that is behind it, that splinter of eternity which the artist has has been able to capture and imprison in his work. This turns a piece of art into a starship capable to fly beyond time.
Truly immortal works of art are extremely rare. To enter the Olympus of the universal masterpieces, to possess the magic that our mind confers on certain objects, they must escape all human limits, break the barriers of logic and common sense to enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.
There are artists that return at the essentiality, simplicity, purity peculiar to childhood. They feed their artistic search drawing on the children’s universe. Paul Gauguin wrote: “I would like to go back, beyond the horses of the Parthenon, till the little rocking horse of my childhood.