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generous platter of the lamb, pours two glasses of retsina, and sits down across from me.
    â€œTo start with, ‘worry beads’ is an ignorant translation,” he begins. “It says more about the way English people think than it does about the Greeks.
Kombolói
have nothing to do with ­worrying.”
    Whenever Dimitri and I have these conversations, he assumes a teacherly air with more than a hint of strained patience, but nonetheless it is clear to me that he enjoys his role as my cultural interpreter. He is, in fact, an unusually astute and cosmopolitan man.
    â€œ
Kombolói
have to do with time, with spacing it out, making it last,” he goes on.
    Spacing time out? Making it last? Like many Greeks I know, Dimitri slips naturally into metaphysical pronouncements, although he certainly would not call them that. Dimitri is simply expressing his worldview, and that worldview sees time as a malleable thing, multidimensional, based not just on planetary movements and clocks but also on the way we personally apprehend it. So for him, time can shift depending on how a person experiences it, even by how he
chooses
to experience it.
    In modern philosophy, the idea that time is not solely a linear, measurable, objective thing was considered a radical ­concept when twentieth-century existentialists and phenomenologists resolved to give top billing to
subjective
perceptions of time. Reacting to the primacy of the scientific worldview, these philosophers argued that the way we
experience
time is ultimately more relevant to a human philosophy. In effect, they were elevating Dimitri’s natural sense of the nature of time to a philosophical paradigm.
    Phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl introduced the idea of “lived time,” contrasting it with “clock time,” that is, objective, scientific time. In their view, lived time is basic because we are “time-bound” beings, aware that our lives have a time limit. We measure time in personal, idiosyncratic ways. Concepts like “now” and “not yet” and “waiting forever” vary in meaning from one individual to another and, for that matter, from one time to another. If I say, “The years certainly do go by faster as I get older,” it does not do much for me if someone responds, “But you know, of course, that the years
really
go by at exactly the same speed as always.” I know perfectly well how fast those years
really
went by.
    It is little wonder that Dimitri easily distinguishes between clock time and lived time. In the ancient Greek language, the two concepts deserved two different words:
Chrónos
denotes the dimension of time, its duration, which moves steadily from future to present to past; the kind of time referred to when one says, for example, “I’ll meet you in the port at high noon.”
Kairós
denotes the quality of time rather than its quantity, in particular an
opportune
time, like “the perfect time to take stock of my life.”
Kairós
describes time’s particular significance for an individual; it is time that has personal meaning as compared to universal dimension.
    In her provocative book-length essay
Time
, another paperback I packed in my suitcase, Eva Hoffman illustrates how the experience of time varies from culture to culture and from one period to another in a particular culture. Hoffman quotes a ­Romanian poet on how time felt to her in the late twentieth century: “For more than thirty years I lived in the opaque world of communism, where time had no value. All we had left was talking. Our conversations, sometimes delightful, were a never-ending chatter over full ashtrays and cheap bottles of alcohol, night-long discussions, and hung-over mornings. Time was frozen for us. We weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere.”
    Life on Hydra is lived andante, no matter what the political situation in Athens. There are no roads or cars