Gonna take a sentimental journey

Gonna take a sentimental journey
Gonna set my heart at ease
Gonna make a sentimental journey
To renew old memories.

          -“Sentimental Journey”

          (music by Les Brown and Ben Homer, lyrics by Bud Green)

In sixth grade (more or less when I was twelve) I had a stern teacher who was known for his discipline and his excellence. He was middle-aged, never married, and lived with his mother. Every Friday he would release the pent-up edge of adolescence energy that we had accumulated by sitting at the school’s old spinet piano and leading us in rousing renditions of old show tunes and the songs from the Great American Songbook. As a consequence, I know the lyrics to songs that were popular when my grandparents were young. I am richer for it. (Start with the Ella Fitzgerald version. It is less sappy than Doris Day’s.)

Watch collecting, especially vintage watch collecting, is essentially a sentimental endeavor. It leans into our emotional nature at the expense of our rational being. Let me explain.

Sentimentalism has long roots in both Eastern and Western thought. Mencius counseled that man’s nature was inherently good and that our moral sense was emotional in nature and that by pondering right and wrong we obtain wisdom. Leading philosophers of the Enlightenment further expressed systems of moral sentimentalism. It was in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments that he first explores the concept of the concept of the “invisible hand” that guides men’s economic decisions. Rather than being a response to the rationalism that was inherent in the Industrial Revolution, as Romanticism was, Moral Sentimentalism thought to explain man as an emotional being, capable of good or ill.

How many watches do you need? One? Three? Five? The answer is certainly less than you have. The collecting impulse runs contrary to the rational and the utilitarian. We have watches, because we want them, not because we need them. If I have 10 or 50 or 500 it is because there is an attachment to them that is not rational. It must be sentimental.

I haven’t done this, but perhaps you have (or know someone who has), bought a watch to celebrate an important life event. We attach an emotional meaning to the birth of a child, a promotion, or a marriage, with the purchase or gift of a watch. A watch was a traditional gift for a graduation or retirement. By this watches mark time by event as well as by minutes or hours. This is inherently sentimental. A person who has retired has arguably less rational need for a time piece.

I mostly collect vintage watches. I don’t have the nicest or rarest. I don’t have the first appearance of a certain complication. I collect the old and forgotten, those that have been left at the back of drawers, with no strap and a cracked crystal, only to be found when someone passes on. Each of these watches has a small story that I don’t know. It is all that remains of someone’s uncle, or grandfather. I am surrounded by benign spirits in watch form.

Who was Carl Schaefer? What did this old Gruen commemorate? I don’t know the answer to either question. The internet can’t record every random event that occurred in 1947.

Why do I care?

Because this man lives as long as his memory lives.

His watch lives with me. I was gifted it five years before he passed. He was an engineer who helped develop radar systems in World War II as a young man. He was a graceful skater and natural athlete. He was very rational. He would wonder why I spend so much to service it and keep it in active use. He would have put it in a drawer.

He would be right, of course, if all that we do is rational. It really isn’t rational that after all these years I know the words to “Lazybones”, and “How Deep is the Ocean?” It isn’t rational to own boxes of watches. Lean into the emotional attachment. Think less, feel more.