3/23

"There was a clock, high up in the sun, and i thought about how, when you don't want to do a thing, your body will try to trick you into doing it, sort of unawares. i could feel the muscles on the back of my neck, and then i could hear my watch ticking away in my pocket and after a while i had all the other sounds shut away, leaving only the watch in my pocket. i turned back up the street, to the window. he was working at the table behind the window. he was going bald. there was a glass in his eye- a metal tube screwed into his face. i went in."

This passage represents one of the biggest motifs in this book, which is how importantly people view the concept of time. The repetition of all the things that involve time stress the importance to Quentin, who represents the scholarly up right member of the family. Because this is something that is important to him, it consequentially is something that is important in society. This is reflecting the importance of the precedence of time set by Benji, who has absolutely no sense of time, and because of his disability, it shows that society thinks time is important. This is why their "respectable" son thinks its very important, and Benji has no idea of what is so important about it.