Clinging to the elementary

I’m feeling incredibly lucky at the moment; while the world fights against COVID-19, my circumstances leave me safe, content and occupied. I have become a baker and a candlestick-maker - and looking at the results, I am a butcher as well. I am also reading ‘The Adventures of  Sherlock Holmes’. It turns out that murder, mayhem and Mrs Hudson actually make for comforting reading when the world starts to feel a bit apocalyptic. This may sound questionable, but after a few chapters of ‘A Study in Scarlet’ the idea that I should be comforted by often gruesome detective stories seemed quite...well, quite elementary.

All the Sherlock Holmes stories have three basic principles at their core. One, the mystery is solved only on the basis of real and explained evidence; two, said mystery is solved by a quirky character in a funny hat; and three, we, through Watson’s eyes, remain close to the excitement of “the game [that’s] afoot”, all the while having the comfortable feeling that the eponymous hero will solve the crimes with “the science of deduction”. These three principles make the stories soothing as we face this pandemic. Humanity is suddenly vulnerable, and the idea of a man, a pipe and his flatmate saving the world - or London at least - from villains is a balm.

We depend on our own social constructs and expectations - like having exams in May, or an assertion that the rich, powerful, developed countries are somehow invincible to disease. These expectations, which stink of human arrogance, have fallen away with the click of Mother Nature’s fingers, and we are brought to realise how inconsequential the particulars of our little lives are as we confront this virus. So while I wallow in the comfort of the rationality of Conan Doyle’s stories to distract from what feels like the irrationality and madness of our situation, it has become evident that we are dealing with the same attitude problem that we were in the 1800s: a selfishness and individualism reflected in the character of Sherlock Holmes, a self-proclaimed and self-congratulating “consulting detective”, unwilling to work collectively with Scotland Yard. Conan Doyle establishes that there is a lesson to be learned by Holmes; a lesson we could do well to learn too. Our ingenuity as a species doesn’t excuse our arrogance.

Mr Holmes is a fantastical invention, but he becomes a vehicle through which we can see ourselves. So, while we are being forced to recognise the toxicity of the individualistic aspects of the society in which we live, we are also being forced to see the counterpart of this: the wonderful functionality and collectivism of those heroes that do live among us, our key workers. Unlike Holmes, we can’t hold any one villain accountable for COVID-19. But we can make a conscious, collective effort not to return to business as usual after this passes. Let’s take the hint from the natural world, as it reminds us, much as Mrs Hudson would, that she’s not just our bloody housekeeper.