Quote of the Week

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” Albert Einstein

The Past is the Present

In this electronic age words never really disappear. From the most important to the most banal, the recorded words of the past live on and all are immediately accessible to everyone, always. Back before the Cloud and social media, whatever anyone penned only existed on paper or in print. If you wanted to read the Bible or the Koran you had to hold a copy in your hand. Today, you not only can take it with you but have it read to you as you drive, jog, etc. 24/7 access, not only of holy books but anything written, now or from antiquity!
A whole generation never has had to spend hours walking down the stacks of a library or bookstore to do research. At the speed of the internet, we submit our queries to Google and the text we wish to read arrives.  In this digital age, anything that’s been said or written exists forever for anyone to access, NOW! Like instant soup, the words of the sages, literary geniuses or plain folks’ tweets appear on our screen. So how has that changed our relationship with words and our past?
For most, written words i.e. books, have lost a certain value. If you can read anything from the past either for free or for a small fee, would you buy a “first edition?” Only rare book collectors retain that kind of respect for the printed word. On the flip side, words are being sold, such as the first Tweet by Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey (The First-ever Tweet Sold As An NFT for $2.9 million, Alexis Benveniste, CNN Business Tue March 23, 2021)
Also, words today never disappear. Everything the media says or the courts decide, or you write on Facebook, lives on forever. You can dig into what someone said a day or a year ago and use it against them as if they said it today. Thus the words of the present become the words of the future!
Old books and diaries of writers are digitized. When they were living, their reach in the literary world was constricted to a small circle of individuals and to local bookstores. The digitized versions make their writings available, on demand, to the entire world. Memorializing their lives no matter how far in the past they lived allows scholars to study them as if they were alive today.
Before the digital age was even born, William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.” So today we immerse ourselves in the words of the past and they lives right alongside our present!

Quote of the Week

We are all born as originals, and yet many people die as photocopies.” Blessed Carlo Acutis