““The clock is Shandy’s first symbol: under its influence, he is conceived and his misfortunes begin, which are the same thing according to this sign of time. Death is hidden in clocks, as Belli said, along with the unhappiness of individual life, of this fragment, of this thing that is divided, disintegrated, deprived of wholeness—death, which is time, the time of individuation, of separation, the abstract time that rolls toward its end. Tristram Shandy doesn’t want to be born because he doesn’t want to die. Any means, any weapon, can be used to save oneself from death and time. If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fatal, inescapable points, then digressions lengthen that line—and if these digressions become so complex, tangled, tortuous, and so rapid as to obscure their own tracks, then perhaps death won’t find us again, perhaps time will lose its way, perhaps we’ll be able to remain concealed in our ever-changing hiding places. These””
