The Legend of Franck Muller - Westime

PART TWO
CRAZY HOURS
EMPIRICAL TIME VERSUS
EXPERIENTiAL TIME
To simply call the Crazy Hours a
watch is to do it a disservice. It
is less of a timepiece in the
conventional sense and more of
a radical reinvention of the wristwatch.
What was once a precision device has now
become no less than an art form, a vehicle
for emotional expression and a statement
of personal philosophy so strong that its
influence resonates even to this day, seven
years after its creation.
In the swimming pool, at the time it was first
conceptualized, Franck Muller looked up into
the night sky and swore to eschew all that had
come before. He vowed to invent a timepiece
that would shake the very foundations of
horology by reinventing timekeeping —
transforming it from a civil code into a pure
emotional language. But, to do so, he would
have to first delve into the very roots of time as
we know it.
Muller explains, “Time was an invention
of man to organize society so that social
discourse and business could take place.
Our lives became compartmentalized and
divided so society could function. It is for
no small reason that Geneva is the
epicenter of time. Two hundred years ago,
Geneva was one of the most important
commercial cities in the world. The
Germans, the Spanish, the French and the
whole world came to Geneva to exchange
merchandise. As such, civil time as we
know it was created in Geneva. The traders
passed through Geneva and they arranged
for meetings. But the problem was that
setting up meetings was similar to trying
to establish a meeting in the Middle East.
When you arrange a meeting with someone
in the Middle East, the concept of time is
very loose. When you say, ‘Let’s meet on
Tuesday,’ it can mean Tuesday this week
or Tuesday next week, or the week after or
in a month.
“Similarly, the difficulty in Geneva was
reconciling these different concepts of
time. So Geneva was the first city in the
world where a law was imposed that
people must give specific times and dates
for meetings. The history of precise time
was therefore born in Geneva, where a
law was passed that said, ‘If someone
makes a commercial meeting for a specific
date and time, they are obligated to honor
it!’ As you imagine, watches became
very important for anyone setting foot
in Geneva.”
As a result, the Swiss became obsessed
with precision and chased the elusive goal
to make watches more and more accurate.
This was entirely natural, because
embedded in Swiss culture was an
underlying pragmatic need for accuracy.
Any frequent traveler who has visited
Geneva in the last 200 years can attest to
this. Says Muller, “This culture still exists
today. This is the reason a train in Geneva
that states it will leave at 12:01 will leave
precisely on time, not one minute before
or after. Switzerland has become the nation
of precision.”
But Muller’s feeling was that civil time,
the 24-hour day, binds man into a certain
routine that he cannot escape from. He
explains, “We are all formatted from the
time we are born to follow a routine, to
follow certain rules. At a certain time we
wake, at a certain time we eat breakfast, at a
certain time we take our bath, at a certain
time we work, at a certain time we go home,
we eat dinner, we go to bed.”
Ironically, it took a son of a Genevan to
revolutionize the concept of time and to slip
from its imperial clutches. Says Muller,
“After a certain time, this becomes so much
a routine that human beings are robbed of
their spontaneous nature, of their creativity.
You are told you should only make love to
your wife in the evening, but according to
what rule? Shouldn’t something like this be
regulated not by the rules of society but the
rules of the heart? We are so programmed
in our heads that our lives become a
structure that we feel we cannot escape. We
become so encoded that we are moving
mindlessly from one moment to the next,
never reveling in the present to truly enjoy
the experience.”
Indeed, the only time in our lives when
human beings bestow unto themselves the
freedom to enjoy life to its fullest, to exist
and revel in its full sensual glory, is during
the period that has become known in
colloquial parlance as the “holiday”.
Interestingly, it is uniquely during this
period, rooted in ancient pagan ritual
periods of thanksgiving and celebration,
that the human heart is given its full measure
of freedom. For Muller, the mental attitude
evinced during the holiday is something
that is at the very core of the Crazy Hours.