The Winter Nightmare

I am sometimes asked why I do not wear a wristwatch : it is simply because I do not want an instrument beside me reminding me of the passage of time. And the reason, in turn, for wishing to forget this flow is because of a nightmare that I had many years ago. I dreamt that I was a young horologist in the London of 1899, and that I had been commissioned by the Royal Academy of Sciences to conduct an investigation into everything that had been written in German on the topic of Time from 1150 AD to 1890 AD. I dreamt that I spent 15 years trying to learn the German tongue and acquiring some sensitivity to its subtle nuances, and another 20 years in collecting the various manuscripts on the theme of Time from that period. At the end of 35 years, I suddenly realised that I had become so old that I had no time left to read the books on Time that I had gathered.