"My dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, "life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable."
As you may already tell, the format of this blog post is again a little different to previous ones. I am trying to keep my blog exciting, and I thought that perhaps by discussing this beautiful passage with you I could try and keep you interested. So here I go.
The above passage, as is obvious, was extracted carefully (well, copied and pasted, but we can pretend that I used a scalpel to precisely cut the edges of a page from my book 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' and then gently stuck it down on this blog post using minuscule blobs of super glue) from a short story from a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. This particular snippet was taken from 'A Case of Identity', a rather interesting story.
If you know me, then you know that I love Sherlock. I love the BBC television show more than I love anything else in the world and therefore decided to turn the first page of A Study in Scarlet with a held breath and delved into the extraordinarily sublime world which envelops Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Rarely do I get so absorbed by a book that when I peer up and over the edge of it my vision is blurry and all I can see are the wonderful characters I have fallen so in love with, but Arthur Conan Doyle's stories of Sherlock Holmes's adventures do just that.
I apologise greatly for that moment in which I just attempted to convince you to read the Sherlock Holmes stories. I hope you now have Amazon up on another tab and are ordering the books right this instant! Back to what I really wanted to talk about. The passage.
I have never read something that portrays human life better, and the realisation of how true Sherlock's words are hit me so fast that I had to sit back and re-read the paragraph, my heart racing and my face flushing with excitement. He's right. If I were able to fly over London (or anywhere for that matter) and use the before mentioned scalpel to gently prise the rooftops from houses I would be able to peer in and see something beyond the imagination of any person.
Life. Real human life. People living, breathing, existing. People brewing tea, taking a shower, reading a newspaper, having arguments, sharing kisses. People doing such normal, everyday things that they go unnoticed to those lost in daydreams. You could imagine the wildest stories, in which knights battle dragons and princesses kiss the princes of their dreams, but reality is so much stranger, so much less cliched, so much richer in adventure. The most bizzare of imaginings cannot in any way be more enthralling than the life of an average human being.
Next time you thing your life is dull, or you sit there and think to yourself 'nothing happens to me', just remember Sherlock's words. Remember that "life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent" and then maybe, just maybe, you can see just how important every life on this earth is. Perhaps then you will see that your life is actually much more complex and intricate than the life of Sherlock Holmes.
I hope this post hasn't made you so bored that you've removed yourself from your computer screen and begun to shoot at the wall in frustration, and has instead given you something to think about.
I hope you are all enjoying the adventures that life has to give. Good night.
Ayesha x
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