Articles & Essays
On Time…
Founders Editorial
By R. Wachter
Caliber & Quill began with watches, pens, and notebooks.
At least, that’s the simplest way to explain it.
It would be easy enough to say this is a publication about timepieces and the written word, about good paper and old pocket watches, about photography, travel, and the objects we choose to carry through our days. And all of that would be true, in part.
But it still wouldn’t quite get to the heart of it.
Caliber & Quill is, more than anything else, about time.
Not just in the literal sense of hours and minutes, but in the larger, more human sense of it. The way we choose to spend our time. The way we try to record it, preserve it, and remember it. Even the way we choose to waste it. For as long as human beings have measured time, we have tried just as hard to outsmart it, despite knowing we never truly can.
We build clocks and create calendars. We wear watches, keep journals, save letters, and capture moments in pictures. We hold on to objects that remind us of who we are, then pass them on to those who come after us to remind them of who we were.
And yet, time will do what it has always done.
It will continue to move forward.
It will soften edges and change people. It will carry some things away while leaving other things behind.
In the end.
Time will always win.
I don’t mean that in a grim way. If anything, I think that’s exactly what gives time its value. Because it’s limited, it asks something of us.
It asks us to pay attention.
Nothing we wear or carry in an effort to preserve time can actually bend it. That was never really the point, however. The objects we carry remind us to take notice of time while it passes. They act as a doorway to something much larger.
A watch can tell you what time it is.
It can’t tell you what to do with that time.
That part belongs to us.
It belongs to the foggy mornings and rainy afternoons that altered your plans. To the surprise birthday party you threw for your best friend. To your first big promotion. To the day you retire.
Time is the one thing every human being shares, yet no two people experience it the same way. The same could be said about the items we choose to carry with us each day. We select these items because they remind us to take notice—not only of the routines that fill our days, but of the moments that give them meaning.
They simply remind us that we’re here.