SIC SIMPER ERAT, ET SEMPER ERIT
I am seated before a screen, letters, words, sentences appearing by magic, as fingers press buttons. The words, arranged in grammatical structure convey the meaning within my mind, and serendipitiously to your mind, if you should discover and read the post. The symbols on the screen are evanescent, held in being by retinal persistence. The screen refresh rate is sufficiently rapid, to allow the rods and cones of my retina to capture and process a constantly evaporating image. So much, meaning itself, depends upon a medium so evanescent.
A few minutes before powering up this computer, I picked up a battered yellow wooden pencil. I prefer a pencil with an eraser to a ball point pen. The hexagon shape of the old fashioned lead pencil is comforting, taking me back to the first grade. As a child, pencil in hand, I practiced the alphabet, on brown wide-ruled paper. Even today I think there is something substantial about my pencil marks in the margins of a page of text.
These contrasting thoughts came to mind last week, as I and my three partners met with Mark, our computer programmer. Mark’s expertise has been valued over the years as our company transitioned from using our Access database to SQL server, and now to a cloud communication environment. Put simply this means information relevant to the service that we offer will be available for use, at any time, from anywhere in the world, instantly. The bits and bytes can be manipulated seemingly without limit.
We have come a very long way from the beginnings. I hold in memory a day from those early years. I was on vacation seated poolside at a Holiday Inn in Knoxville Tennessee. On the table before me was a stack of invoice forms, which I filled out, one at a time, stuffed into a stamped envelope, which was dispatched by the post office to each customer. The marks on the paper surface were palpably substantial, overtures to customers, in expectation of payment.
Pen or pencil on paper, markings, containers of meaning, for a vast network for commerce, –and not limited to 
commerce alone. Such exchanges between us are surrogate for the physicality of touch, being-in-touch; that which binds us together as a people and as a culture. This is very ancient. I am reminded again of the small statue of the Egyptian scribe bent over his scroll of papyrus, stylus in hand.
The Romans once said, “thus it has always been and thus shall always be.”
I would not bet on that.
