Some months ago, I had my annual physical which included a neurological workup. I’m told this was essentially the same test a former head of state took, and I am happy to report that by those same standards I too am a stable genius. At one point in the assessment I was asked to draw a clock face showing 3:30 pm. At first, I thought it was a cute trick question as most analog clocks display 12 hours; am or pm are not differentiated. Nevertheless, I drew the clock face and at the end of the assessment asked the nurse about that question and she laughed. “No”, she said, “I guess I had not considered that. But you would be surprised how many people have trouble remembering which is the hour hand and which the minute.”
Thinking about that I wondered out loud whether the issue was cognitive decline or simply our reliance on digital clocks. Those of us who grew up in an analog world should have no problem recalling how analog clocks work, but I am hard pressed to point out very many working examples I see in the course of the day. Perhaps if I wore a watch I would think otherwise, that is if it were a watch that had hands instead of a display. My phone tells me the time, so does my car, the timer at the gym, my TV, the microwave and stove and several clocks scattered throughout the house—all but one digital. One small clock in the Kitchen still ticks off the minutes and hours with rotating hands –it isn’t precise but close enough.
It won’t be long before analog clocks go by the wayside—consigned to the anachronistic dustbin. I am not nostalgic for them by any means. Digital clocks are an improvement as are so many other devices that surrendered to the digital age. I do mourn the romance of some analog conventions, though. Watching a digital timer count down just doesn’t convey the passing of time in the way the trickling sand in an hourglass does. And truth be told, while I do not miss the scratches and hisses of the records that I played through my teenage years until well after I graduated from college—digital recordings lack a certain warmth, precise but without humanity. Now you might think that is an odd choice of words to describe what I find lacking, but I mean it in the sense that our analog world had just enough imperfection to recognize the human touch in its fashioning.
The Japanese have a word for this, Kintsugi, the art of emphasizing imperfection by calling it to our attention. Perhaps you have seen it in a bowl or plate that has been mended using fine gold or silver mixed with lacquer to create something , well, different but still beautiful. Art critics often refer to this same quality of imperfection in Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. What elevates this portrait to its vaunted status is the faithful rendition of an imperfect beauty. In 2004, a team of physicians analyzed La Gioconda and pointed out a number of latent signs of disease that presumably afflicted Lisa Gherardini, the subject of the painting. Not least of these is her enigmatic smile, a residual trace, the good doctors suggest, of a bout with Bell’s Palsy.
In our endless attempts to achieve perfection, to improve the quality of our lives and save ourselves from boring drudgery we have left behind the nuances; the tiny grace notes that made our analog world less accessible, and arguably less efficient but so much more connected to the reality of life. We may be living in a digital world, and in the future we may trade our foldable bills and coins for crypto currency and our Mona Lisas for NFTs of The Bored Ape Yacht Club –after all progress such as it is cannot be stopped only waylaid occasionally. But I wonder whether we will notice the erosion of those analog frictions that added depth and texture to our everyday interactions. I miss the kinesthetics of writing by longhand—though I wouldn’t give up my word processor and I love having my Kindle library along on a trip but prefer to read a book I can hold in my hands.
Will future generation look back fondly at our iPhones and fitness trackers, our tablets and AR goggles and smile with rueful nostalgia? I think not. Perhaps they will find our present era quaint, a fleeting retrospective curiosity to be displayed on virtual field trips for the edification of 25th century school children. But I cannot imagine any breathing soul who will find the tools and works of our day bristling with clues to the dreams and fears, hopes and doubts of our age. They will not find us there hidden in the ones and zeros. To be human is to be analog.
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