The Cogitating Ceviche
Presents
The Last Clockmaker
By Conrad Hannon
Narration by Amazon Polly In an era obsessed with disruption, there remains a certain poetry in resistance. Not protest in the modern performative sense—algorithm-fed outrage and shareable slogans—but a quieter defiance: the refusal to upgrade, speed up, and yield to the tyranny of seamlessness. This is the posture of the clockmaker. Not the horology influencer hawking sapphire-backed smartwatches on TikTok, but the real kind: the anachronistic artisan who repairs mainsprings and polishes gear trains in shops that smell faintly of oil and obligation.
Clockmaking, like many trades now considered arcane, once stood at the very frontier of human ingenuity. Time itself was not always easy to catch, let alone measure. The early horologists—part scientist, part philosopher—did not merely make instruments. They defined the modern relationship between humanity and time. A pendulum swing became the heartbeat of empire, the synchronizing agent for railroads, factories, and markets. To make a clock was to wield subtle authority over motion and consequence. Time was not a digital abstraction but a force that had to be coaxed into coherence.
Today, we have offloaded that burden to satellites and operating systems. Our wrists vibrate not with the click of escapements but with the polite hum of Bluetooth-enabled reminders. Efficiency has never been higher, and attention has never been scarcer. In the antiseptic precision of atomic timekeeping, we lost something human: the tension between order and entropy, the intimacy of imperfection.
The Man Who Refused Progress
Enter Ernst Vallon. Or rather, let him emerge—from a haze of brass filings and disobedient spring coils—not as a man precisely but as a composite. A manifestation. Vallon is not the subject of this essay so much as its argument in flesh and fingernail. He is every craftsman who ever looked at an efficiency study and said, without irony, "Not for me."
You will not find Vallon in trade directories or searchable databases. His shop exists in a city not listed on any map, though it might be familiar if you've ever wandered down the wrong alley behind a cathedral and passed a window softly ticking. He may be a living man, yes. But equally likely, he is a constructed patience, given the shape of shoulders hunched over a bench. (If Vallon seems invented, that's because he is. But only in the way that myths are invented: to explain something we've forgotten how to do.)
He does not mourn the past. He simply refuses the present's terms.
His workshop is neither deliberately antiquated nor self-consciously quaint. It is merely appropriate. The tools hang from hooks worn smooth by decades of reaching. Loupes and tweezers rest in leather-lined drawers. Light falls through windows cleaned just enough to admit illumination without glare. On the walls, technical drawings—some yellowed with age, others freshly annotated—depict the intricate anatomy of timepieces that defy contemporary classification. They are neither antique nor modern, but something more essential: functional objects whose form speaks their purpose with crystalline clarity.
The first time you visit—and there is always a first time, though you may not remember how you found the address—you notice the quiet. Not silence, which implies absence, but quiet: the presence of restrained sounds. The soft chime of the hour. The nearly imperceptible click of gears engaging. Your own breathing, suddenly conspicuous. And beneath it all, a low susurration that might be the accumulated whispers of all the seconds this room has witnessed.
The Discipline of Clockmaking
Clockmaking, in its purest form, is a confrontation with the inevitable. Every component must obey physical laws. Every adjustment has consequence. There is no margin for error, and no patch to download. The maker must learn not just the parts but also the character of time: its stretch, recoil, and stubborn refusal to cooperate with design.
Vallon maintains that the discipline of horology teaches virtues that are vanishing: patience, precision, and humility before complexity. A clock does not tolerate the shallow satisfactions of speed. It cannot be rushed. The skill of clock repair is built on tactile memory and hard-won intuition—muscle knowledge as much as mind. It takes hours to disassemble, clean, recalibrate, and reassemble a mechanical movement, hours spent in absolute concentration, with no guarantee of success. A screw misaligned by half a degree, a jewel not seated with surgical accuracy, and the entire system fails. There is no auto-correct.
To Vallon, this difficulty is not a drawback. It is the very point.
"People say they want things that work," he says, through imagined tobacco smoke. "But really, they want things that make them feel like nothing is broken. Those are not the same."
He speaks infrequently, and when he does, it is with the careful precision of someone accustomed to working with components so small they must be handled with wooden tweezers. His language, like his craftsmanship, eschews ornamentation. Each word seems measured against the silence it displaces, judged worthy only if it contributes to understanding. He does not hate conversation. He simply respects the weight of utterance.
The clockmaker's hands tell a different story than his sparse speech. They move with the uncanny grace of practiced certainty, each gesture calibrated to the exact force required—never too much, never too little. His fingers know the difference between brass and steel, between silver and nickel, between fragile and merely delicate. These hands can feel irregularities measured in microns. They can diagnose a chronometer's ailment by the subtle resistance of a winding stem. They remember, in their tendons and calluses, what the conscious mind might miss: the exact tension needed to coil a mainspring without overstressing the metal, the perfect pressure to seat a balance wheel without bending the staff.
Technology Versus Craft
He does not hate technology. In fact, he admires it. He once wrote a letter—in fountain pen, naturally—to a Swiss startup using AI to restore antique chronographs. He praised their ambition, then politely observed that "the digitization of knowledge tends to forget the difference between repair and replacement." They never replied.
The world, increasingly, has no patience for repair. Objects are meant to be upgraded, not sustained. When a phone slows down, it is not adjusted; it is discarded. When a friend becomes inconvenient, one "sets boundaries." Even our vocabulary reflects this shift. Restoration is quaint. Optimization is gospel.
Disposability has ascended from economic strategy to philosophical stance. We have come to believe that newness itself confers value—that iteration indicates improvement. In many cases, this is demonstrably true. Medical technology advances with lifesaving consequence. Renewable energy technologies improve with environmental necessity. But the ideology of perpetual upgrade, applied indiscriminately, becomes a form of amnesia. We forget not just how things were made, but why. We forget that some designs achieved perfection generations ago, not despite limitations but because of them.
In Vallon's estimation, the mechanical watch achieved such perfection. A well-made timepiece from 1850 can still keep accurate time today, provided it receives proper maintenance. Its functionality does not expire. Its interface does not become outdated. It does not require an operating system update that mysteriously reduces its performance. It does not collect data on its wearer. It does not claim more attention than it warrants. It simply performs its singular function with quiet dignity, decade after decade.
The clockmaker preserves this dignity through his work. Each repair is both a technical challenge and moral act. By refusing the easy replacement, he insists that objects—and, by extension, ideas, relationships, values—need not be disposable. That quality, once achieved, deserves preservation.
The Heretical Workshop
In this ideological atmosphere, the clockmaker becomes a heretic. His bench is an altar to effort that cannot be monetized. He spends four hours reshaping a single gear tooth by hand, fully aware that the cost exceeds the clock's market value. But to him, value is not a matter of exchange. It is a matter of correspondence between form and function, between time and its instrument.
His refusal to teach apprentices is not bitterness. It is caution. "There are students who want the knowledge," he admits, "but not the discipline. They think precision is an aesthetic. They think craftsmanship can be taught in modules."
There was once a graduate student who shadowed him for six weeks. She was researching "anachronistic labor rituals" for a dissertation. Vallon obliged, even allowed her to record some of his repairs. She uploaded them to a Vimeo channel. One clip, titled Temporal Embodiment in Resistance, went mildly viral among design theorists. He never watched it.
The student wrote about his "performance of authority" and "tactical temporality" in the face of digital capitalism. She noted his "embodied critique of accelerationist tendencies" and the "gendered dynamics of technical expertise." Her analysis was not wrong, precisely—but it missed the essential truth of his workshop. Vallon did not resist technological progress as an ideological stance. He simply preferred the integrity of mechanical problems and their solutions. Theory could never capture the material satisfaction of a clock brought back to life, the moment when a deadened mechanism begins once more to mark the passing of time with its steady heartbeat.
Occasionally, a different sort of visitor would find their way to his door. These individuals might be recognized by certain signs: hands that moved with deliberate care, eyes that lingered on mechanisms rather than decor, and questions that revealed an understanding of what they were seeing. These visitors did not come to study Vallon as an academic subject or as a cultural curiosity. They came to witness a practice they recognized as fundamentally sound.
These visitors speak a language beyond words. They understand that physical laws are not social constructs, that gravity does not yield to critique, that friction is not subject to theoretical reconsideration. They know that a clock, like any machine, must work. And working, in this context, is not a matter of opinion or perspective. It is the definitive state of a mechanism fulfilling its purpose without compromise or approximation.
To these visitors, Vallon might show his private collection: timepieces too rare or significant to be sold, each representing a pinnacle of its particular lineage. A marine chronometer that once guided ships through treacherous waters. A pocket watch commissioned for a long-forgotten diplomatic exchange. A tower clock mechanism rescued from a demolished church, now running in silent testimony to the building it once served. Each piece contains not just mechanics but memory—the accumulated knowledge of generations, preserved in brass and steel.
The Philosophy of Time and Craft
Vallon believes in analog permanence. Not permanence in the sense of durability—everything breaks—but permanence in the sense of integrity. A machine, however small, should not pretend to be frictionless. He regards friction as moral. It reminds us that action has a cost. That movement requires effort. That time, to be meaningful, must be earned.
This earned time manifests most clearly in the clockmaker's relationship with his own mortality. Vallon knows that his skills—accumulated through decades of practice, refined through thousands of repairs—cannot be fully transmitted through language. Certain knowledge resides only in the body, in the nervous system, in the complex interaction between perception and action that we call craft. When he dies, some of this knowledge will die with him. The written record will preserve technical specifications, dimensions, and procedures. But the feel of a perfectly adjusted escapement, the sound of a well-regulated striking mechanism—these sensory judgments cannot be adequately described. They must be experienced, embodied, and repeated until they become instinctual.
Yet he does not despair at this inevitable loss. Instead, he finds dignity in the cycle of knowledge: some preserved, some forgotten, some reinvented by future generations who will approach old problems with fresh perspectives. In this way, the craft is not so different from life itself—a continuous process of loss and renewal, with each iteration both honoring and transforming what came before.
There is a romance here, of course. A romance that today's culture, addicted to novelty and flattened by irony, finds almost embarrassing. But that embarrassment is precisely the problem. We mistake sleekness for elegance, convenience, and for progress. We are terrified of labor that does not scale.
The irony, and it is rich, is that Vallon is, in many ways, a technophile. He reads trade publications from Germany. He can diagram a quartz oscillator with surgical precision. He owns a custom bench light with programmable hue settings. He just refuses to confuse tools with ideology. Technology, he insists, must remain in service to craft, not its replacement.
His interest in technical innovation is neither reactionary nor indiscriminate. He evaluates each advancement against a simple standard: does it serve the essential purpose of the object, or does it merely add complication for its own sake? Does it enhance the relationship between the user and the tool, or does it insert unnecessary mediation? Is it designed to last, or designed to be replaced?
This pragmatic approach extends beyond his workshop. In his sparse living quarters above the shop, one might find surprising evidence of selective modernism: energy-efficient LED bulbs in antique fixtures; a carefully maintained heating system that combines contemporary efficiency with century-old radiators; a kitchen equipped with knives of superior contemporary metallurgy alongside cast-iron cookware that predates his birth. Each object has earned its place through demonstrated value, not novelty or status.
The Unintended Legacy
Vallon's most significant impact may be one he never intended. The few individuals who have spent meaningful time in his workshop—those rare visitors who came with the right questions and the patience to hear the answers—carry something of his ethos into their own fields. A furniture restorer in Copenhagen who rejects the planned obsolescence of contemporary design. A violin maker in Cremona who combines acoustic physics with traditional techniques. A letterpress printer in Melbourne who creates typography of startling originality while using equipment considered obsolete by commercial standards.
These practitioners do not constitute a movement. They share no manifesto, no slogan, and no hashtag. What connects them is not ideology but approach: a commitment to material reality; an acceptance of necessary difficulty, a preference for direct experience over mediated convenience. They practice what might be called embodied authenticity—not as a lifestyle brand or social media aesthetic but as a technical discipline.
In this quiet lineage, Vallon's influence propagates not through fame but through practice. His name may never appear in design textbooks or innovation histories. His methods will not be featured in TED Talks or productivity seminars. Yet the quality he represents—the insistence on uncompromised standards in the face of expedient alternatives—continues to find expression in workshops and studios where craftsmanship is still valued as both process and outcome.
This legacy-without-recognition suits him. He has never sought influence, only excellence in his chosen field. That others might find inspiration in his example is incidental to his purpose. He does not work to be admired. He works because the work itself demands completion. A broken clock represents disorder in the world. Repair is not merely an economic activity but a moral stance: the assertion that broken things deserve restoration, that entropy can be temporarily reversed through skilled intervention.
The Final Winding
He may never have existed. But he will be missed.
No parade will be held when the clocks stop—as they inevitably will. There will be no commemorative stamp, no docuseries narrated by a serious actor in a tweed coat. There will be, perhaps, a few oblique references in footnotes. A half-remembered anecdote in a book on slow design. And then: quiet.
The workshop, wherever it is, will fade. Time, for once, will not be measured but assumed. There will be no one to notice that something has gone slightly off, that seconds no longer align quite as they should. This is not a tragedy. It is an epilogue.
The real loss will be harder to register: a small but crucial refusal to surrender to ease. Vallon is not meant to be remembered. Only recognized. As the shape of a mind that once held craft above commerce. As the ghost in the gears.
And the refusal continues as long as we imagine him—somewhere, winding a clock that doesn't know it's obsolete.
Somewhere, a man still oils the gears.
And for a little while longer, time resists obsolescence.
Perhaps someday, when the digital networks have grown too complex to maintain, and the infrastructure of constant connectivity begins to fail, we will rediscover the value of mechanisms that require no external power, cloud storage, or subscription fees. Perhaps then, in some dusty drawer or forgotten display case, someone will find a timepiece that still works—or could work, with proper attention. They will hold it to their ear and hear nothing. But with the right touch, with tools improvised from necessity, they might bring it back to life.
In that moment, Vallon's ghost will stir. The knowledge will not have been entirely lost. It will live in the object itself, in its design, in the elegant solution to problems of physics and function that remain unchanged by fashion or market forces. The new repairer will make mistakes and will learn through trial and error what the old masters knew by training. But the essential truth—that mechanical problems have mechanical solutions, that attention yields understanding, that time can be captured through craft—will be rediscovered.
This cycle of forgetting and remembering is itself a kind of timepiece. It measures not seconds or minutes but generations. Its mechanism is culture rather than clockwork. Its purpose is to remind us that what seems lost may simply be dormant, waiting for the right moment to reveal itself once more as necessary.
Until then, we can only imagine the man at his bench, working by lamplight as the world outside accelerates toward some uncertain destination. His hands move with practiced precision. His attention remains undivided. The clock before him neither knows nor cares that its kind is endangered. It simply waits to be restored to its purpose: the marking of moments, the ordering of days, the quiet insistence that time, properly attended, need not be the enemy of human endeavor but its most faithful companion.
In the gathering darkness beyond his window, invisible satellites transmit time signals with cold accuracy. Servers synchronize to atomic standards. Devices update automatically. But here, in this room that might exist only in our collective memory, a different relationship with time persists. Here, time is not a resource to be optimized but a mystery to be respected. Here, through the disciplined application of skill and attention, chaos yields—however briefly—to order.
And in that yielding lies a truth worth preserving: that what we make with care endures; that craft is not decoration but essence; that some things, once perfected, need only maintenance, not replacement.
Somewhere, a man still oils the gears.
And it matters.
Thank you for your time today. Until next time, stay gruntled.
