Sherlock
Holmes has been an acquaintance of mine for many years: Like a friend I had growing up with, moved
away, but still keep in touch with at sporadic intervals.
I am a
member, at large, of The Occupants of the
Empty House, a scion society of the Baker
Street Irregulars.
My first introduction
to Holmes was in the school library in my early teens when I read The Speckled Band. It was many years before I could obtain the
complete works, but over the years I reveled in finding new adventures which I
would read over and over.
A Study in Scarlet was my first purchase, and I
remember underlining Watson’s observation of Holmes:
“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 be to me 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 furniture as you choose. A
fool takes in all lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the
knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out……. It is a mistake to think that that little
room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for
every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before.”
What a
revelation! However, since that time I
have stocked my attic with such miscellaneous trivia that now, when my attic is
full, I can afford to lose prior knowledge without any remarkable results.
The Occupants
of the Empty House have a website that might interest those who would love to visit London
where it is always 1894.
the Ol’Buzzard
