Kairos

Kairos is a sense of time that is separate from chronos or chronological time. Ralph Ellison has a great paragraph or two about Kairos in the prologue to Invisible Man: "Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a well-digger's posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent's sense of time.

Great rhetors always think outside of chronology - they are often described as, for example, a few seconds ahead of their opponents or bringing ideas before their audiences at exactly the correct moment. Occasionally we may experience physical moments that are outside of time. I recommend these. Yesterday I moved around a speedway at over 160mph. Scientifically, "mph" means movement through time but when the human soul moves at that speed with gravitational forces tugging hard and a cement wall looming feet or inches away, science is knocked cold. So rhetoric is like boxing and driving a race car ... who'd a' thunk it? Whatever rhetoric is, it is not science!