“Imagine you’re at a bookstore. In one section are time management books that give advice for adapting to a general sense of time scarcity and a world always speeding up: either counting and measuring your bits of time more effectively or buying time from other people. In a different section, you find cultural histories of how we came to see time the way we do and philosophical inquiries into what time even is. If you’re scrabbling for time and feeling burned out, which section would you turn to?” (Odell xiii).
It may be the least understood rhetorical appeal. My students come to class with at least some understanding of ethos, pathos, and logos, but kairos is mysterious, abstract. I sometimes describe it as comic timing, the ability to know when a punchline will land or when to add a joke in an otherwise serious speech. This makes it granular, syntactic, probably reductive.
In the introduction to Saving Time, Jenny Odell distinguishes kairos from its sibling ancient Greek word for time: “Chronos, which appears in words like chronology, is the realm of linear time, a steady, plodding march of events into the future. Kairos means something more like ‘crisis,’ but it is also related to what many of us might think of as opportune timing or ‘seizing the time'” (xvii).
Seizing the moment make more sense to me. Supposedly, Vladimir Lenin said, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” It’s still not clear to me if the quote is accurate or apocryphal.
I bought Saving Time on a whim in a one-room basement bookstore on Independent Bookstore Day. It was in a “general nonfiction” section alongside history, memoir, science, psychology, and self-help.
I only started reading it today (fittingly, May Day), but because I did not manage my time well this month, the one book I finished in April was Alexandra Teague’s memoir Spinning Tea Cups, about family, time, kitsch, tourism, grief. One line that I keep returning to is the first sentence of an essay titled “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” that reads, “The deadest of all the dead people in our family was my mother’s father” (152).
The sentence is syntactically simple, just a subject (the deadest), a verb (was) and an object (my mother’s father). It is the first sentence in an 18-page essay about the narrator’s grandfather, who died in 1944 aboard the USS Mount Hood. The last phrase, my mother’s father, effectively shrinks seven decades and three generations into three words, while The deadest of all the dead people in my family is an epigenetic treatise, a genealogy. But it’s not the construction of the sentence that gets to me so much as the moment, the atmosphere, in which I read it. This, too, is how kairos works. No matter how much time one spends revising and polishing and perfecting, timing, in the end, is everything.
The Lenin quote is easy to utilize for anything that feels momentous. Venture capitalists pushing new tech have even used it to sell their hype. If it’s not apocryphal, it’s probably about identifying resonance, patterns. Seizing the present crisis and holding firm, not backing down. Odell maintains that kairos is more hopeful because, unlike neatly demarcated and sold units of time, kairos allows us space for contingency, for possibility.
That writing moves away from the author once it has an audience is difficult for a perfectionist like me to contend with. Perhaps writing is to chronos as reading is to kairos. On one side is a long, repetitive process of self-interrogation, of trial and error. On the other is the singular opportunity to collaborate with someone else’s craft, to seize the moment and allow oneself to be moved. And being moved, being open to the contingency that other writers open up to me through their experiences, is the reason I want to read so much in the first place.
Odell, Jenny. Saving Time. Random House, 2023.
Teague, Alexandra. Spinning Tea Cups. Oregon University Press, 2023.
Keene Short 