I was contemplating a recently repaired clock today, quietly purring away, and thinking how artificial digital clocks are. If one considers them in culture, they tend to represent implacable countdowns of some mechanical/technological catastrophe. Always in either glaring red or green. They simply don’t lend themselves to ornamentation, names, or anything else.

But mechanical clocks have hands and faces, they are grandfathers or slaves, they strike and speak, they are cats, cuckoos, and skeletons. They run for a day, a week, a year.

Can you imagine Cinderella’s midnight hour being indicated by a digital clock? Or Hoffman’s owl atop one in Tales of the Nutcracker? Dali’s clocks as digital?

Maybe in a thousand years….or maybe not. The steady beat of a mechanical clock, tick-tock, has far more connection to the beat of the human heart than a silent set of numbers.