Lost Over Canyon Paperless

 When I look 'round the room which houses the collected Sherlockiana that I've picked up over the years, there are shelves of books, yes, but also other gatherings of printed pages.

Journals, newsletters, flyers, monographs, note cards, copies of talks read at meetings. Not always well organized, and always with the knowledge that more lies unseen, in boxes tucked away elsewhere in the house. One likes to think of such things moving to archives somewhere, or to the collection of another Sherlockian when you're gone. But both of those thoughts have one unspoken condition: Someone has to find these things worth storing, and such storage implies that someone will want to read these documents in some future time. That someone will want to spend some of their precious lifetime reading and reviewing the accumulated by-products of your precious lifetime.

Scanning such things into searchable digital form might be fun. And footnote fans love to have a prior instance of some thought like "Nathan Bogspar suggested Watson's gout in a 1975 issue of The Garrideb Gazebo." But at the end of the day, most of this paper was created just to entertain ourselves in the moment, for the writers and readers of that day. And in this day, so many of our Sherlockian writers and readers have gone paperless . . . look at these very words, which shall never see a printed page. 

If you've ever been involved in the sale of used books, you know that even books, that most hallowed of print forms, don't all end their lives gathering dust on shelves. Very popular authors of their year never become classics or even cult favorites, simply because their works were entertainments of the moment. And that's life. That's the ongoing evolution of our culture. Those ideas entered the human hivemind, influenced those who read them, for better or worse, and then were not needed any more. Citizens of a future world had new things to contend with, new entertainments to indulge in.

And consider our newfound frenemy, the artificial intelligence software. It can scour the internet for data, form its conclusions, and learn for its next attempt. But it doesn't have all of the info, does it? It doesn't know some things even exist that didn't make Project Gutenberg or were otherwise noted on Wikipedia or somewhere. And even digital information can wind up unretrievable. Even AI is a thing that lives in the moment.

It can seem so depressing, this ongoing march of history and all it leaves behind, but really, I think it just reinforces what Zen masters have always taught us: Be present in the moment you're in. Enjoy this moment. Let the past go when it doesn't serve future needs. That might seem counterintuitive when enjoying a hobby that is all about a figure from the past, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. History entertains Sherlockians, even the history of Sherlockians themselves. But we can't carry it all into the future with us, and we can't expect others to bear that load for us. 

Sherlock Holmes had the luxury of all his papers and books being contained in stories that continue to be retold. His move to that cottage in Sussex was managed with just a few words on a page. The rest of us aren't nearly so lucky, but that's life. Literally.