Sep 8, 2007
Seriously ... not science fiction ... science fiction can be
very serious, actually, but this is one-hundred percent real...
It's about that letter that I wrote and mailed back in 1972, which
turned up a few days ago on eBay... You can see it right
here.
September 22, 1972 ...
that was the day I wrote and presumably mailed that letter.
They had xeroxes back then, I suppose I might have xeroxed it, but
I don't recall. If I did, I know I haven't seen it since
then, until it was on my screen two days ago...
I put the letter in a mailbox back then. It was an age a lot
like ours. Television, radio, rock music, even ships in
space. But crucially different in one extraordinary respect:
no Web.
I couldn't have imagined, even in the science fiction I was just
beginning to write back then, that that letter would come back to
me in this way.
Maybe if I had been rummaging around in my attic this week, looking
at old files, and I had come up with a copy of that letter, it
would have felt different. More like a peek at the past.
But on my screen, the letter feels as if it's traveled right from
the past, right from my hands when I dropped it into whatever
mailbox back then, to my eyes, right now.
September 22, 1972 ...
glimmering before me, now ... a message in a screen-bottle across
time ... a communication from my earlier self, intended for someone
else, not me, but now I realize that maybe this was meant to be
...
Maybe, in some cosmic recondite logic, I was intended to be the
recipient of this letter, right now, right here, in this way, all
along ...
It feels strange, but good, to be in touch with my 1972 self this
way ... I think I've done ok ... he would have been happy to
know that this was the result, or at least one result, of the
letter he put in the mail to me...