Looked at the watch which had entered his life at almost the same time as the sunglasses had; thought “mausoleum, desire, time” then “mausoleum, desire, time or hope?” and looked again at the “mausoleum” — hard to say how much the seconds counter had advanced between the two downward glances, though the feeling was of just one second — 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 togocuplid in the shadowofatrunk / Shadow of a fat trunk
It now reads 18:08 — using its stopwatch 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 I had initially had it, because looking at the watch Time had seemed to be in it, an arabian night, could have been the idea, a tiny mule “whose centrifugal straining pushed the gears of our own synchronicity”), “of our own savage synchronicity“, I’d wanted to say. He thought the phrase meant that only those who are mortal, and who thus have finite time, as represented by the watch, can 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. A search is not producing it) To look at the watch and see not “Timex” nor “watch” but Time Itself, was thought (and Timex suddenly seemed like Latinx, which I’m always mispronouncing in inadvertent parody as laTINKS) — to see one’s vanished desire and its objects, ones unaccomplished hopes.
One was old, you knew what that meant now — 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) … (The Computer was the Federal, and the cellphone was the State, Prison of Time.) And of what were these sunglasses the mausoleum? (“Of myself,” from the one side and “of the world” from the other.) And if you include this cap I’m wearing, I’ve got a whole Cheopian pyramid over myself practically, the perfect buffer and disguise.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 