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The Sherlockian Letter Earlier today, I wrote a letter to an old Sherlockian friend. This might not seem worthy of comment, much less a column on the subject, but the act of actually writing a letter, putting it in an envelope, and preparing it to send it suddenly seemed like an affectation worthy of the Society for Creative Anachronism. It was not always such. In my basement are several boxes full of files, each with the name of a Sherlockian on the file. Each file is full of letters, letters that were answered, and often answered at great and thoughtful length. They are artifacts of a time in the past, before the internet moved into our lives with such pervasiveness. And things were very different way back then. One hates to whine about the "good old days," and lament about lost bits of yesterday, but it really is amazing the difference that a decade or so can make. Sherlockians have always been spread out across the country and the world, but fifteen years ago a three-day letter turnaround was as good as it got. The mail would come, a good letter would turn up, a pleasant evening could be spent after dinner typing out a rambling reply, and then envelope it, stamp it, and drop it at the post office the next day. Maybe the next week a reply would come. Producing a letter, an actual solid letter, seemed a little more substantial, like you'd accomplished something. And there was a more intimate feeling to it . . . like you had a direct, government-secured private channel to communicate with. (What is it about e-mail that makes us think that spreading our thoughts all over an e-mail listserver is a good thing?) While e-mail can work the same, just faster, for some reason it's never quite seemed the venue for a long and thoughtful mental perambulation. Electronic bits and bytes seem fine for calculations, databases, and graphics. But, as ironic as it might seem in this venue, words just don't seem fully realized until they hit paper. But perhaps that will change . . . . Still, it always seems like there might eventually be a place for a Sherlockian letter-writing society, as that old style of communication fits so well with the world of Holmes and Watson. Yet what would motivate us to give up our electronic conveniences and actually slog our envelopes down to the post office once more? What sort of ideas would we trust to a sole copy run through the machineries of the post office? At this point it seems a lot like calligraphy . . . a pretty enough thing, but also a time-wasting affectation. But isn't that what any game is? And this hobby has been calling itself a Grand Game for a long time. Well, I hate to be less thoughtful in this week's blog than I once was in a plain old letter, but taking time out to fiddle with some art for next May's Sherlockian mystery weekend in St. Louis ("The Site of the Four") took a bit of time out of the evening. . . Your humble correspondent, |
