The Clock of the Long Now
Notes
Transcript
Patricia Fortini Brown, in Venice and Antiquity, notes that the ancient Greeks distinguished two kinds of time, "kairos (opportunity or the propitious moment) and chronos (eternal or ongoing time). While the first ... offers hope, the second extends a warning." Kairos is the time of cleverness, chronos is the time of wisdom. Our dead and unborn reside in the realm of chronos, murmuring warnings to us presumably, if we would ever look up from our opportunistic, kairotic seizures of the day. This must be the Golden Age of Kairos we live in.
-Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 9.