It's Kairos time again, you're gonna leave me

Outtakes from yesterday's Brooks that I can't process but can't quite let go of.

1. More on kintzugi:

I don’t know about you, but I feel a great hunger right now for timeless pieces like these. The internet has accelerated our experience of time, and Donald Trump has upped the pace of events to permanent frenetic.

Please don't eat the teacups.

"Timeless" has to be one of the most vicious words in the advertising lexicon. I remember especially from my magazine days how it used to be applied to watches. You'd be talking about this grotesquely ugly $30,000 diamond-studded time-keeper and the copy would be gushing over the "timeless masterwork". The hell you say. And there's nothing more time-ful than a kintzugi bowl, with all the vicissitudes of its life literally glowing through its body like streaks of pure pain.


Also, the Internet (I'm still capitalizing it, sorry @NYTimes) has not accelerated our experience of time. What it has done, I think, is to decrease our ability to experience time at all, starting with our ability to be bored, as we just pull out our phones when we're waiting for a train or a download on the computer. Trump is the kind of person who has always needed constant entertainment to keep his symptoms quiet—can't be alone without the TV on—but as a non-reader hasn't himself been affected by the Internet the same way we have. Brooks is right to suggest that Trump has affected the Internet, at the same time, by attempting to make policy moves through it, which, though they generally fail, keep us all busy in ways we didn't expect to be busy; he's wrong to suppose that these things are "events". But if he thinks buying expensive pottery is the way to cure our Internet ills, he needs to rethink that.

2. On ancient Greek time:

The Greeks had a concept of Kairos time, which is not quantitative like our normal conception of time but qualitative — rich or empty, the meaningful hour or the hurried moment. When you’re with beauty, in art or in nature, you tend to move at Kairos time — slowly, serenely but thickly.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that ancient Greek used a concept of time that is different from our normal concept in having a qualitative rather than quantitative character, especially good for the discussion of time that is slow and serene but thick, which can be referred to as "Kairos time"?

Answer: In principle yes, according to the Wiki-whacky, but with some reservations:

Ancient Greek had two words which we would translate as "time", chrónos  (χρόνος) for time as a dimension and kairós (καιρός) for a point in time, a moment, especially the time for performing some particular action. The latter also means "weather" in modern Greek, like "le temps" in French, and in the plural kairoí "the times" as in our benighted o-tempora-o-mores era. In classical Greek literature it is used to specify the right moment for a particular action, the way we say in English "now is the time" often appealing to metaphors from archery where there's an exactly right moment to release the arrow; and in the New Testament it always refers to "the appointed time in the purpose of God".

The concept is qualitative because you can evaluate it, right time or wrong time, but that doesn't mean it's particularly artsy or slow and thick. I can't believe Brooks isn't making this up as he goes along, but it doesn't relate to anything in the real world of language. And English certainly has the same pair of concepts, we just don't express it with two different words.

3. On works that aren't harsh or flowing from fear:

A friend of Brooks's, the Japanese-American Christian painter Makoto Fujimura, director of the Fuller Theological Seminary’s Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts,

once wrote a book called “Culture Care.” It is an argument against the whole idea of a culture war. It advocates an environmental movement for the culture — replacing the harsh works that flow from fear with works that are generous, generative and generational.

That last word is a breath from another age. What would it mean to live generationally once in a while, in a world that now finds the daily newspaper too slow?

In fact, Fujimura published the book in 2017. The kairos when he wrote it ("once") is not as interesting as the chronos, and to be honest that's not very interesting either.

Moreover, the word "generational" doesn't seem ever to have been used before around 1960, or around the time David Brooks was born.

So it is probably not a breath from another age. If you lived generationally "once in a while" I'm sure that would be a kairos rather than a chronos, especially if you chose the right time for doing it, but I'm not at all sure what it would mean. I imagine Fujimura's Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life (InterVarsity Press, 2017) would help me out, but I'm not encouraged to try. This is the worst column Brooks has written in quite some time, in purely literary terms, and I'm less interested than usual in whether it has any content at all.