It should be noted that this entry is a placeholder [of sorts] while I gather my thoughts about The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which I finished reading [re-reading] on Saturday. At the end, Edgar and Almondine found each other. Edgar was remorseful. Almondine was kind and thoughtful.
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I have just begun reading Tinkers by Paul Harding. I like it [so far]. So quietly lovely with its fragments and images of a life's deeds and accomplishments, recollected [and perhaps imagined] by a man on his death bed. The man, George Cosby, had been a watch repair and dealer.
In the first chapter, Harding embeds a description of how to re-assemble a dismantled clock from a 1783 text about horology, the study or measure of time. It is written with intricate and pain staking cogency. Its words portray deliberateness and patience and skill. Seemingly [again, so far] important to someone like me who likes to create and re-create order in her life, most especially by positioning and re-positioning objects and words in their proper places.
I have copied Harding's borrowed words here:
To reassemble the dismantled clock, the back plate of the works is laid upon a bed of soft cloth, preferably thick chamois folded many times. Each wheel and its arbor is inserted into its proper hole, beginning with the great wheel and its loose-fitting fusee, that grooved cone of wonder given to mankind by Mr. Da Vinci, and proceeding to the smallest, the teeth of one meshing with the gear collar of the next, and so on until the flywheel of the strike train and the escape wheel of the going train are fitted into their rightful places. Now, the horologist looks upon an open- faced, fairy-book contraption; gears lean to and fro like a lazy machine in a dream. The universe’s time cannot be marked thusly. Such a crooked and flimsy device could only keep the fantastic hours of unruly ghosts. The front plate of the works is taken in hand and fitted first onto the up facing arbors of the main and strike springs, these being the largest and most easily fitted of the sundry parts. This accomplished, the horologist then lifts the rickety sandwich of loose guts to eye level, holding the works approximately together by squeezing the two plates, taking care to apply neither too much pressure (thus damaging the finer of the unaligned arbor ends) nor too little (thus causing the half-re-formed machine to disassemble itself back into its various constituent parts, which often flee to dusty and obscure nooks throughout the horologist’s workshop, causing much profaning and blasphemy). If, when the patient horologist has finished his attempt and the clock, when thumbed at the great wheel, does squeak and gibber rather than hum and whir with brass logic, this process must be reversed and tried again with calm reason until the imps of disorder are banished. Of clocks with only a going train, reanimating the machine is simple. More sophisticated contraptions, such as those fashioned with extra abilities, like a pantomime of the moon or a model fool juggling fruit, require an almost infinite skill and doggedness. (The author has heard of a clock supposedly seen in eastern Bohemia that had the like- ness of a great oak tree wrought in iron and brass around its dial. As the seasons of its homeland changed, the branches of the tree turned a thousand tiny copper leaves, each threaded on a hair-thin spindle, from enameled green to metallic red. Then, by astounding mechanisms within the case (fashioned to look like one of the mythical pillars once believed to hold up the earth) the branches released the leaves to spiral down their threads and strew themselves about the lower part of the clock-face. If this machine in fact existed, Mr. Newton himself could not have sat beneath a more amazing tree.) --from The Reasonable Horologist, by the Rev. Kenner Davenport, 1783
Beneath this excerpt about the horologist's task of reassembling the dismantled clock, Harding writes:
George Crosby remembered many things as he died, but in an order he could not control.
[It is this kind of writing, I believe, that should be studied by those of us who want to learn how to place words upon the page with skill and beauty.]
