the Greater Nomadic Council

Sherlock Holmes

Sir Doyle's stories had a deep effect on my character early on. He taught me to observe closely the world around me in an attempt to remember and make sense of it. Sherlock's discipline shares something with Zen awareness of the moment. However, it seems most people don't understand what sort of weirdo Holmes really is. Warren Ellis gets it, though:

There’s a deep strangeness to Holmes that rarely makes it out into adaptations. One of the first mentions of Holmes made to Dr John Watson – a war veteran with a dodgy left arm – describes a lunatic at loose in a morgue, whacking corpses with a big stick to see if people bruise after death. The walls of his disgusting rooms are slathered yellow from the hundreds of tobacco products he’s lit and let burn out there so that he can study and catalogue the peculiarities of their ashes.

He fails to mention, however, that Holmes was a cocaine addict in the early stories. That trait was changed to a fondness for shag tobacco and playing discordant notes on a violin. One of the passages that has stuck with me for many years now is this one from A Study in Scarlet where Dr. Watson is describing Sherlock Holmes:

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

"To forget it!"

"You see," he explained," I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help hi
m in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent."

Although I don't agree with this idea, it's one that I've never forgotten. In fact, I was thinking about it just last week for some reason. It reminds me of the fact that our brains work best when the activity is most focused in one area or another. Rather than using only part of our brains being a flaw, it is a sign that we're working at our most efficient. When flailing around for an idea or an answer, the activity will be diffused across many different lobes. When engaged in a task such as writing or problem solving, only the areas necessary are used, an example of efficiency and concentration. Even so, the fact that such bits have stuck with me from my childhood imply the power of Doyle's tales. If you have never read any Sherlock Holmes, you're missing out.