Looked at the watch which had entered his life at almost the same time as the sunglasses had; thought “mausoleum, desire, time”; thought “mausoleum, desire, hope” and looked again at the “mausoleum” — hard to say how much the seconds counter had advanced between glances, the feeling was of just one — the “Ironman mausoleum (by Timex)”, and wondered what that phrase, that time was a mausoleum (or that the watch was Time’s mausoleum) may have meant.
(Dried fallen leaf on a branch shadow of the pavement. Cold to go cup lid in the shadow of a trunk.)
It now read 18:08 — using its stop watch function — 18 minutes of having walked, 18 minutes from home, 32 minutes before entering through the service door and squeezing behind the small Korean wife at the desk, exchanging greetings and heading to his locker in the back.
Phrase was Faulkner’s, that a watch was “the mausoleum of all hope and desire”, (and not the mausoleum of time as he had initially had it, because looking at the watch Time seemed to be in it, could have been the idea, the beast of burden whose centrifugal straining pushed the gears, the gears by which we ourselves were locked and moved with synchronicty), he thought “the phrase means that only the mortal could… can… ” but couldn’t then finish the thought, which was taken up in the motion of his moving feet and tossed as a person or a raft might be taken up and overturned by ocean waves. (The thought he had tried to finish then had been that only those who are mortal and who thus have have finite time have an attachment to the world, and thus also have a desire for and hope about the world and what’s in it.)
Tried to remember a phrase of Shakespeare: that time was the sack where all good deeds go (or something –perhaps from one of the histories.) To look at the watch and see not “Timex” nor “watch” but Time Itself, was thought (and Timex suddenly seemed like Latinx) — to see one’s vanished desire and its objects, ones unaccomplished hopes. One was old, you “knew what it meant now” –beyond Quentin’s set of issues– and what was the etymology of Time anyway? And another question: of what was the computer, and the cellphone, the mausoleum, if the watch was the one that held desire? (of Wisdom, of Justice, of Knowledge?) …if the watch was the one that held Desire? (The Computer was the Federal, and the cellphone was the State Prison of Time mayhap.) And of what were these sunglasses the mausoleum? “Of myself,” it seemed from the one point of view; “of the world” it seemed from the other. You couldn’t see or be seen so well, while underneath this partial rock lid and “catafalque”, which he supposed to be the point of sunglasses. “Their arms are burning candles around the catafalque,” was thought. –“And if you include this cap I’m wearing, I’ve got a whole Cheopian pyramid over myself.”
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 