Who Has Time for Parsifal?

I Googled “good amount of watch time for a TikTok video” and found that Planable, a content marketing company, suggested 15 to 20 seconds as a decent watch time .¹  That wasn’t too far off from another statistic I’d seen: that the average person spends 15 to 30 seconds looking at each painting in a museum .²

In this type of environment, one might worry about the survival of something like Parsifal, a four-and-a-quarter-hour–long opera from the nineteenth century. If time is money and attention spans are shrinking, an opera this long seems like not only an exorbitant luxury, but actually something we are no longer up to the task for. Between the productivity-minded adage that “everyone has 24 hours in a day” and the daily incursions of the attention economy, there doesn’t seem to be anything left. But what happens to the supposed difficulty of Parsifal if we change our lens on time? What if it’s not simply quantitatively longer than what we’re used to, but actually a way of escaping the world of quantitative time altogether?

The ancient Greeks distinguished between two types of time: chronos and kairos. Of the two, chronos is the more familiar in everyday life: it is the linear, subdivided time of clocks, calendars, and timelines. As I wrote in my 2023 book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, chronos is where time feels most like money—the domain where we literally buy and sell time, and more broadly feel the anxiety of time scarcity, as though minutes were fungible units missing from our wallets. When we lament that we “just need more time,” it’s often the bits and pieces of chronos time that we wish for more of.

Kairos is something far less measured. Representing the time of change and opportunity, it has less to do with interchangeable minutes and more to do with unique moments—in particular, the type of moment that must be seized before it passes. Tellingly, in Greek, kairos also means “weather .”³ Given this aspect of non-repeatable, non-interchangeable moments, you can maybe already see the affinity of kairos and live performance. Indeed, the philosopher and musician Kathleen Coessens has suggested that in attending a theater performance, you step from chronos into kairos. The performance, scheduled and marked off at a time and place, is necessarily “inserted in the chronos.” Once it begins, however, the production is “enclosed in its own artistic time and place and is enacted in moments of now, reaching out towards the whole act.” ⁴

Anthony Tommasini, the author of a New York Times piece titled “How Long, in Opera, is Too Long?” would likely agree. Praising Parsifal for its spiritual drama, he suggests that “if you can let the trans􀀪xing music take you to this metaphysical sphere, you adjust to Wagner time, and the opera not only proves riveting but also seems the length it must be .”⁵  How convenient! But the operative word there is “if.” For those especially steeped in chronos, an important question remains: How do I get on Wagner time?

What this requires may not actually be effort, but something like the opposite. I think of what happened when I taught an observation-themed writing workshop, where I asked students to watch a video that was ten minutes long (a whopping 600 seconds) that someone had made out their window of an ordinary street intersection on a commercial corridor. The students were asked to write down everything they noticed, then share this list with their neighbor. Before showing the video, I warned them that they might go through several emotions: confusion, boredom, and finally irritation with the seeming pointlessness of it all. (Privately, I warned myself that I’d feel their impatience vicariously and want to stop the video.)

But then, I promised them, something else would happen. The attitude of the impatient, avaricious mind would wear away, and they would pass over a threshold into curiosity. And that is exactly what happened. Once the students had gotten through that wall of boredom and confusion, what had seemed an onerous “task” turned into the freedom to observe without judgement or analysis, to become absorbed in the life of the street (kairos disguised as chronos?). To my surprise and their own, they told me that by the end, they actually didn’t want the video to end. It was not just curiosity on the other side of the threshold, but a kind of bliss.

The other key word in Tommasini’s suggestion is “let”: You must let yourself. In Saving Time, I draw on the German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper’s tract, “Leisure, the Basis of Culture,” in which leisure means not a vacation but an attitude of mind: one that “runs at right angles” to the entire world of working, grasping, and analyzing. It represents a total reorientation of self and world, “the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation .”⁶  Embodying this attitude requires us not to furrow our brows, but simply to let go: Pieper compares it to the unforced character of falling asleep. Likewise, if opera, like all of theater, presents a portal to kairos, perhaps the way in is to loosen one’s expectations, to release the grasp, and prepare oneself not so much for the consumption of “content,” but for a wild encounter in kairos.

If this requires you to turn off part of your brain, it’s interesting to consider what part. For me, the natural corollary to time-as-money is the individualized, productive self whose only modes are working or consuming, and whose only way of thinking is transactional. The person who recently tweeted “pro tip: you can basically read >100 books per day by asking chatgpt to summarize them for you ”⁷ might be an extreme example, but this notion of art as something you consume, as if downloading information and screening out everything not obviously relevant, is fairly widespread. I find this to be an  impoverished view not only of art, but of the self, as though we were 􀀪xed units who could only be added to or subtracted from. At least in my experience, authentic encounters with art offer something quite different: neither addition nor subtraction, but an unsettling of the very boundaries of the self in time and space.

As it turns out, this movement out of oneself and into something more oceanic might be especially apt to the themes of Parsifal. Writing in Theater Journal, Sandra Corse has placed Wagner’s final opera alongside The Birth of Tragedy, a book by his contemporary, Nietzsche, as a critique of Enlightenment rationality . Specifically, Wagner and Nietzsche were both interested in the tension between what has been called the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Whereas the Apollonian describes the realm of representation, individuation, and reified forms, the Dionysian involves a “trance-like state” in which the participant overflows her bounds, dissolving into community and into the environment. Corse reads the character of Parsifal as a saint-like figure bringing Dionysian vitality to the dried-up and brittle world of the Apollonion. And Wagner, who called Parsifal not an opera but a “festival play,” ends it with a Good Friday festival, imagining that the “audience and players would come together, as the ancient Greeks did, in a quasi-religious ceremony that would give them a new understanding and renewed commitment to their social and communal life.”

What happens to us in theater—or rather what can happen to us, if we are open to it—can be summed up by how Corse quotes Nietzsche:

…there are moments and as it were bright sparks of there of love in whose light we cease to understand the word ‘I,’ there lies something beyond our being which at these moments moves across into it, and we are those possessed of a heartfelt longing for the bridges between here and there.⁸

Seen in this light, an opera as long as Parsifal appears not as something to be endured, but as a merciful cessation in what we endure on a daily basis: life as boxed-in individuals hoarding bank accounts full of minutes, never meeting, never changing, never being moved. Yes, from within chronos, the time that Parsifal asks of us may appear unjustifiable, and yes, it is to chronos we must return when the opera is over. But from within the theater-walls of kairos, washed of minutes, hours, and the walls of the self, we might perceive the opera for what it really is: a reprieve, a gift, and an invitation.

End Notes

1   Moser, Jeremy. “12 Tiktok Metrics You Should Track to
Measure Content Performance and Improve Engagement.”
Planable, 22 Jan. 2025, planable.io/blog/tiktok-metrics/.

2􀀪Rosenbloom, Stephanie. “The Art of Slowing Down in a
Museum.” The New York Times (Travel), 9 Oct. 2014, p. 1.

3􀀪Odell, Jenny. Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the
Clock. Random House, 2023.

4􀀪Coessens, Kathleen. “Musical Performance and ‘Kairos’:
Exploring the Time and Space of Artistic Resonance.”
International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of
Music, vol. 40, no. 2, 2009, pp. 269–81. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20696542.
Accessed 9 Aug. 2025.

5􀀪Tommasini, Anthony. “How Long, in Opera, is Too Long?”
The New York Times, 30 Jan. 2000, p. 37.

6􀀪Pieper, Josef. Leisure, the Basis of Culture. Ignatius, 2009.

7􀀪@packyM. “pro tip: you can basically read >100 books per
day by asking chatgpt to summarize them for you.” X, 5 Ju.
2025, 12:24 p.m.,
https://x.com/packyM/status/1941581399351288033.

8􀀪Corse, Sandra. “‘Parsifal’: Wagner, Nietzsche, and the
Modern Subject.” Theatre Journal, vol. 46, no. 1, 1994, pp.
95–110. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3208957.
Accessed 9 Aug. 2025