Blogging from school, ep. 3

I usually begin these posts with a description of the morning's weather.  ;)  Today, I'll make it brief and (not so) witty:  fog.

The trouble with deductions--off on a totally different topic, here--is that you cannot know whether they are correct or not without walking up to your subject and asking them some very extraordinary and irritating questions.  Sherlock Holmes's rudeness, which so jarred on Watson's nerves in Ch. 1 of The Sign of Four, seems to me to be a kind of naive callousness.  It came from a raw, abrupt, irrepressible search for the answer to a problem, which, in Holmes's brain, presents itself as a puzzle first and a personal matter second.  There is an almost Spock-like (to tie Star Trek into it!)...an almost Spock-like lack of emotion in Holmes's deductions.  He obtains brilliance but, unbeknownst to himself, pays for it dearly.  Their viewpoints were first broadened and then limited, incredibly limited, by logic.

But I make a point of saying Holmes is almost like Spock.  There is at least one important difference; and that is, Holmes has an imagination.  Spock has very little.  Holmes's vivid imagination, which Lestrade & co. so often scorned, actually assists him in his logic.  It's what makes him take up the bizarre and seemingly trivial cases, and we get epic quotes like:

You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day.

And, apart from that, his imagination helps keep him human. 

On a similar note, there are indeed people who emphasize the "machine" side of Holmes, people who even consider him to have an android-like way of thinking.  But if that were so, I don't think he would have dueled Moriarty.  I think if Holmes were really all that cold-blooded, he would have let Moriarty continue to commit crimes in order that he (Holmes) would have something to solve.

Well, I'm going to go read Kafka and drink coffee now.  ;)  Also have an essay to write this afternoon. 

Speaking of school, we had our first history test yesterday.  I think I have Vladimir I's biography totally memorized now...