The famous soft watches (The Peristence of Memory, 1931 MOMA) below, is filled with images and themes. DALI professed to having memory of intrauterine life depicted as the deflated foetus near the center. The meaning of the watches is likewise subject to various interpretations including the elasticity of time and ‘the soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant and solitary paranoic-critical Camembert of time and space’, whatever that means. Apparently, he was wondering when Gala (wife and muse) was going to return home whilst contemplating the softness of the Camembert he had eaten earlier. The ants were a life-long phobia of his. The mountains represent his youth when he would stare for hours at a Spanish mountain range. His ‘paranoic-critical’ ideas are represented by the irrational juxtaposition of softness of the clocks with the hard surfaces of the table top and the ‘plate’ of ocean (upper left):
