After thirty years as a Sherlockian, one occasionally gets a little reminder of where one’s immersion in this hobby all began. For me, this came with a link from Roger Johnson’s The District Messenger,  the newsletter of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. The editor of said newsletter called it “one of the oddest things I’ve come across lately.” To me, it was simply taking Sherlock Holmes as he should be taken.

The link, from a site called “Dumb Little Man: Tips for Life,” is this:

http://www.dumblittleman.com/2008/07/sherlock-holmes-way-of-exceptional.html

The article, if you didn’t immediately go to the link, is called  “The Sherlock Holmes Way of Exceptional Living” by Alex Shalman.  Mr. Shalman simply takes some choice quotes from the Master and ponders upon how each are good mottos to live by. “Throughout the stories, Sherlock is portrayed as a man of profound wisdom, which is why we can call upon him now to learn about what it takes to live an exceptional life,” Shalman writes. And he is most certainly correct.

For many a young man, myself included,  the study of Sherlock Holmes is a bit like seeking the guru on the mountain top, hoping he’ll divulge some little secret of life. It’s what we look for in adults, during those confusing adolescent years, and few adults ever seem like they’ve got it together enough to dole out that wisdom.  Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand,  was about as together as one could be.

But he’s fictional, one might argue, a mere entertainment!  And that’s the truth. But compare Sherlock Holmes to the fleeting fun of a Harry Potter or the cheap thrills of a Hannibal Lechter.  Does one ever find dictums in those tomes worth of remembering when life hands you a particularly hard choice?

Holmes is full of them.  Even his most basic, a line like “when you have  excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth ,” gives us much to take as solid advice in not only discovering, but accepting, the truth of a situation. When there is no other possible explanation,  one must proceed with the explanation one has, like it or not. Others take a bit more interpretation:  “When  one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it.” In other words, we are flesh and blood creatures of the Earth. Whenever we start putting on airs and thinking we’re something better than our fellow men or the other creatures that roam the world, we’re setting ourselves up for a fall.

The Doyleans among us will be quick to point out that every bit of this widom comes from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and that he is the better choice of study than Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Doyle, I would argue, was just a man, like the rest of us. In creating Sherlock Holmes, he put all his ideals and aspirations of what a great man could be on paper.  Doyle, like most of us, was struggling to pay the bills, get along with his wife,  and make it though another day’s work.  Holmes was the torch he held up to lift us above such gray everyday life, the sort of person one should aspire to be. There already was a Conan Doyle, no one needs to aspire in that direction. But a Sherlock Holmes? There’s the unrealized ideal, the thing anyone can still strive for.

It’s “do as I say, not as I do,” the place where the sage counsel of many a parent comes from. Doyle’s other works are often clever and insightful, but Sherlock Holmes gave him a place to show off the best ideas of what a man might be capable of, and it’s surely one of the reasons that the Holmes tales remain so popular, even today. If you do go read Alex Shalman’s article, be sure to read the comments that come after it . . . the wisdom of Sherlock Holmes is as great today as it ever was.

One can learn as much from  The Complete Sherlock Holmes as many as from many another holy book or great classic of thought.  As Holmes himself said, “There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.” Holmes was very fond of taking what he could learn from whatever the source, and we certainly can do so as well.

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver