Romano Guardini:
The old passion for a universe, limited in structure, the old desire for a world in which life was directed and channeled, disappeared. Man began to feel that expansion itself was a liberation. […]
The single historical event lost its unique significance under the immense weight of historical facts and under the impact of the new conviction that time was unlimited. The multiplicity of historic phenomena allowed a unique importance to no one event; rather all events were viewed as having an indifferent significance and value. As the old sense of limitation was sundered man lost that value given those unique historical “moments” wherein the medieval belief in order had reposed. Gone was the beginning and the end, the limit and the center. The concept of hierarchy faded; with it disappeared not only all related convictions about the nature of culture but also its many symbolic accretions. The new world seemed a fabric woven of innumerable parts, a fabric which expanded in all directions. Even as this new world view affirmed a freedom of space it denied to human existence its own proper place. While gaining infinite scope for movement man lost his own position in the realm of being.
Madeleine L’Engle:
Chronology: the word about the measurable passage of time, although its duration varies: how long is a toothache? how long is standing in line at the supermarket? how long is a tramp through the fields with the dogs? or dinner with friends, or a sunset, or the birth of a baby?
Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.
Thank God there is kairos, too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.
Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionato, are in kairos. The saint at prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby, are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the very particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake. We too often let it fall asleep, not as the baby in my arms droops into sleepiness, but dully, bluntingly.
I sit in the rocking chair with a baby in my arms, and I am in both kairos and chronos. In chronos I may be nothing more than some cybernetic salad on the bottom left-hand corner of a check; or my social-security number; or my passport number. In kairos I am known by name: Madeleine.
The baby doesn’t know about chronos yet.