Is anything new?
On the left is an image of the new Apple pencil, launched with much fanfare yesterday. A tech write-up described it as ‘able to sense both pressure and tilt, enabling creatives a lot of freedom when it comes to content creation.’ On the right is an image of the oldest pencil in the world, once tucked behind the ear of a German carpenter, and then left in the loft of a 17th Century house. I suspect that it could also ‘sense pressure and tilt’, though the content creation its owner had in mind was probably a little more 3-dimensional. As the writer of Ecclesiastes wrote in the 9th Century BC, there is ‘nothing new under the sun’.
Images: pencil pages and TechCrunch
Sometimes, though, the old can seem brand new. Earlier this week, for reasons I shall blog about on another occasion, I asked a French speaker at our mother and toddler group to record Psaume 23 (Psalm 23) for me – which you can hear below. To her, the words were brand new, and she was struck by their beauty as if fresh from David’s pen. Maybe they will seem new to you as you listen to them in this different way.
http://richardlittledale.me.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/for-richard-psaume-23-psalm-23.mp3
