… A character’s pursuit of a object with an aura becomes instead a way of understanding that aura, and the esoteric information surrounding the actual, material object.

Now that you mention it, I think that’s quite true. That’s an interesting comparison, because with the watches there was a real-life MacGuffin. Often I’d be in a situation where there was some fabulously rare and tiny and esoteric lost piece of a watch that I assumed was somewhere out there in the world, if only I could find it. A given watch could never be completed until that piece was determined.

A couple of times I found myself communicating with people whose knowledge of those things was so encyclopedic and so esoteric that while everyone else in the world said, “No, that piece doesn’t exist. You’d have to have one custom-made,” which would be prohibitively expensive – then, in some back room behind the back room behind the back room, so to speak, I would find somebody who would stare into space, accessing his memory and then say, “There’s a shop in Cairo… [Laughs] on the top shelf in the closet behind the counter, there is the piece you need. However, it’s not for sale. The only way you can get it is to find this other piece to trade the guy…” And then I would be off looking for the other piece.

Somehow that was delightful. It was like a real-life MacGuffin plot. No one’s life hinged on it, but it was a lot of fun. Sort of like a strange kind of fishing.

And also, the things that one has to go through to make this tiny, unique object that one only knows from pictures on the internet – suddenly this tiny thing appears in a glass test tube on one’s desk: it just seems like a weird kind of magic.