Why We Love Sherlock Holmes

“He is Galahad and Socrates, bringing high adventure to our dull existences and calm, judicial logic to our biased minds,” wrote Edgar W. Smith in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes.

“Let it be said, more simply, that he is the personification in us of something that we have lost, or never had. For it is not Sherlock Holmes who sits in Baker Street, comfortable, competent and self-assured, it is ourselves who are there, full of a tremendous capacity for wisdom, complacent in the presence of our humble Watson, conscious of a warm well-being and a timeless, imperishable content. 

“The easy chair is drawn up to the hearthstone of our very hearts — it is our tobacco in the Persian slipper, and our violin lying so carelessly across the knees — it is we who hear the pounding on the stairs and the knocking at the door. The swirling fog without and the acrid smoke within bite deep indeed, for we taste them even now.”

The Dilemma of Consciousness

“The consequence of forging life by purpose and resolution is a sense of inner harmony, a dynamic order in the contents of consciousness,” wrote psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. 

“But, it may be argued, why should it be so difficult to achieve this inner order? Why should one strive so hard to make life into a coherent flow experience? Aren’t people born at peace with themselves — isn’t human nature naturally ordered?

“The original condition of human beings, prior to the development of self-reflective consciousness, must have been a state of inner peace disturbed only now and again by tides of hunger, sexuality, pain and danger. The forms of psychic entropy that currently cause us so much anguish — unfulfilled wants, dashed expectations, loneliness, frustration, anxiety, guilt — are all likely to have been recent invaders of the mind. They are by-products of the tremendous increase in complexity of the cerebral cortex and of the symbolic enrichment of culture. They are the dark side of the emergence of consciousness.”

News Media 'Sanewashing' Trump

The word of the day is “sanewashing.”

Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop observes that major mainstream news outlets are routinely quoting Trump's incoherent, highly abnormal rants selectively in order to make them sound sane.

Allsop explains that the news media emphasizes “… lines that, in isolation, might sound coherent or normal, thus giving a misleading impression of the whole for people who didn’t read or watch the entire thing…. If journalists are sometimes sanewashing Trump, why are they doing it? … (I)t has something to do with that old desire to project a false equivalence, or ‘balance,’ between the two leading candidates.”

“When I wrote earlier this year,” Allsop notes, “it was in the context of Trump saying, at a rally, that his failure to win reelection would lead to a ‘bloodbath’ in the country — remarks, many critics suggested, that were subsequently sanewashed by allies and pundits who suggested that he was talking metaphorically about the auto industry. I argued at the time that the furor over the phrase missed the point: Trump said many unambiguously dangerous things at the same rally that got far less attention.”

So America 2024 is a place and time where a gibbering reality-TV loony can actually be propped for a second run at dictatorship, thanks to the collusion of corrupt national institutions.

On the Love of Books

“Book love, my friends, … lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last you until your death. It will make your hours pleasant as long as you live.”

— Anthony Trollope

They Are Not Long...

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

Love and desire and hate:

I think they have no portion in us after

We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream.

— 19th century English poet Ernest Dowson, who died at age 32.

Why Freedom is Progressive

Cognitive linguist and philosopher George Lakoff on the nature of American political freedom:

“The traditional idea of freedom is progressive. One can see traditional values most clearly in the direction of change that has been demanded and applauded over two centuries. America has been a nation of activists, consistently expanding its most treasured freedoms:

“The expansion of citizen participation and voting rights from white male property owners to non-property owners, to former slaves, to women, to those excluded by prejudice, to younger voters;

“The expansion of opportunity, good jobs, better working conditions, and benefits to more and more Americans, from men to women, from white to nonwhite, from native born to foreign born, from English speaking to non-English speaking;

“The expansion of worker rights-freedom from inhumane working conditions-through unionization: from slave labor to the eight-hour day, the five-day week, worker compensation, sick leave, overtime pay, paid vacations, pregnancy leave, and so on.”