Frank: Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

So I finished reading March's Book of the Month and it was as good as I expected. I actually remembered them being a bit dryer and stuffier, as books go, but that must have been some of the later works. These were short, pleasant stories that tantalized the imagination and one's deductive skills. There was really one quote that I wanted to bring up and a bit of a long one. It sums up why Sherlock is so interesting, at least to me. This quote is from the beginning of "A Scandal in Bohemia"

"It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions. and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen; but as a lover, he would have placed himself in a false position. ... But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his."

There are a lot theories about the relationship between Watson and Holmes, but I find most of them fail to take into account this description of Holmes. He is more an observing and reasoning machine than a person. He has human-like qualities, but ultimately he is detached from what  makes a person human. Perhaps it would be better to describe as a well trained animal, rather than a machine, but that is splitting hairs. I think this uneasiness with Holmes' nature, the desire for us to claim him as one of our own, makes us project human qualities onto him that he simply does not show.
I greatly enjoy BBC's remake of Sherlock Holmes, but I think they went a bit too far in humanizing him. He lost a bit of the eerie, unsettling machine like quality that I always associated with the great detective. Still, they made the show and they get to determine what kind of Sherlock we see. To sum it up, Sherlock does not relate well to people, especially when it comes to  love and similar emotions that interfere with his reasoning and observing powers. I find  that as unsettling Sherlock can be, it is comforting to know he can go where we can't, dive into  the darkness of the criminal and bring forth a truer justice than any policeman.

It is rare I have the opportunity to discuss Sherlock Holmes, and even rarer to find an opportunity to discuss Sherlock's medical twin, Gregory House. I am a big fan of House, mainly because he reminds me of Sherlock. However, I find House is obsessed with emotion and its effect on people, which leads into his simple but  stunted emotional capacity. The one truly perfect parallel between these two characters is that they both stare into the ugly, wicked heart of the human condition and see the worst of humanity in all its horror, and they do not look away. They accept it and use it to solve criminal and medical cases. I do find Sherlock more forgiving than House, and less surprised when people do the right thing, but House's antics are far more entertaining.