“One day, I will find the right words,” wrote Jack Kerouac in The Dharma Bums, “and they will be simple.”
Kerouac’s pursuit of the ultimate in sophistication, which follows an arduous path of first mastering, then unlearning, so as to eschew the superfluous, has weighed heavily on the minds of anyone who has laboured in service of creativity. For watchmakers, it is the endless need to refine what has been established as perfect for centuries – the round watch, the display of only the most essential information, the fashioning of the most precise hands –
