M&D ch 32

[Joseph Tracy]

ch 32
Twins, listening to cherrycokes description of M&D’s argument,  jump in to supply excitement by imaging a physical fight. They are sent to bed asking for more combat in the story, Ccoke promises Indians for tomorrow, and procedes to tell how Dixon, in effort to cheer Mason tells his tale of a pecuilar watch given to him by William Emerson  before he sails for America on the Falmouth Packet. 

William Emerson( coincidentally the name of the father and grandfather of Ralph Waldo) was Dixon’s informal teacher and a reputed sorcerer, practioner of mesmerism, who taught Dixon to’ fly’ using  ley lines ( ley lines have been seen as hidden lines of force akin to magnetism, but appear to be random to most scientists).   This last seems silly but relates to several topics of the novel: 1)longitude, 2) the idea that there may be ways , practiced by some cultures, of mapping the  fractal and non-grid-like organization of geography that relates to feng shui, magnetism,  geo magnetic telluric electric flows ( these are real) 3) the role of clocks 

Emerson tells Dixon the watch has a mechanism that will revolutionize time keeping and requires no windup. This is actually feasible as self winding watches were invented by different watchmakers around 1777 and Emerson hints at the mechanism. Dixon grows increasingly paranoid about the watch at this affront to the impossibility of perpetual motion. He wonders if Emerson is really the watchmaker or only sending it via Dixon in a secretive plot. He shows the watch to Mason who chides his credulity and makes a song. He begins to imagine the watch as a kind of vegetable  and is somewhat relieved, despite its potential in the longitude contest, when the watch is stolen and subsequently swallowed by an American surveyor named R.C.-  a comic reversal of Chronos swallowing his children. RC’s companions note that he has done this act in an area known ominously as the Delaware triangle. P follows R.C.’s life for a bit including this:

“In the months, and then the years, after he swallows the Watch, as the days of ceaseless pulsation pass one by one, R.C. learns that a small volume within him is, and shall be, immortal. His wife moves to another Bed, and soon into another room altogether, after persuading him first to build it onto the House. “Snoring’s one thing, R.C., I can always do something about that,” brandishing her Elbow, 
“— but that Ticking . . .” 
“Kept me awake, too, at first, Phœbe,— but now, it rocks me to sleep.” 
“Best Wishes, R.C.”   324-5

Begs the question as to how much we really want to live with eternity.

Back to Dixon: 

  “Of course Dixon has to tell Emerson. For weeks after the Express has curvetted away, he mopes about, as gloomy as anyone’s ever seen him. “I was suppos’d to look after it . . . ?” “You wish’d release from your Promise,” Mason reminds him. “Think of R.C. as Force Majeure.” The Letter, in reply, proves to be from Mrs. Emerson. “When he receiv’d your News, Mr. Emerson was quite transform’d, and whooping with high amusement, attempted whilst in his Workroom to dance a sort of Jig, by error stepping upon a wheel’d Apparatus that was there, the result being that he has taken to his Bed, where, inches from my Quill, he nevertheless wishes me to say, ‘Felicitations, Fool, for it hath work’d to Perfection.’ 
“I trust that in a subsequent Letter, my Husband will explain what this means.” 
There is a Post-Script in Emerson’s self-school’d hand, exclamatory, ending upon a long Quill-crunching Stop. “Time is the Space that may not be seen.— ” 

(‘ Pon which the Revd cannot refrain from commenting, “He means, that out of Mercy, we are blind as to Time,— for we could not bear to contemplate what lies at its heart.”)
 325-6

Is time good for us like a vegetable or does Chronos appear benign( perhaps “desired to make one wise”) only to swallow us whole.