The Ennet House living room: Gately, Day, Lenz — "Again I’ll say it—I don’t have…"
Again I’ll say it—I don’t have a digital watch. This is a fine old antique watch. It points. A memento of far better days. It’s not a digital watch. It’s not a cesium-based atomic clock. It points, with hands. See, Spiro Agnew here has two little arms: they point, they suggest. It’s not a sodding stopwatch for life. […] Get a watch. Obtain a watch. A fine, digital, incredibly wide watch, about five times the width of your wrist, so you have to hold it like a falconer, and it treats time like pi.
Context
Day's Spiro Agnew watch speech, his answer to Lenz's third time-request of the half hour. Under the ironist's wit is a genuine philosophy-of-time standoff: analog time that "points" and "suggests" versus digital time delivered to arbitrary precision, "a sodding stopwatch for life." Day, six days sober, has no idea he's diagnosing the house's whole temporal condition.