Free A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel Page A

not the words, which seemed to me far less enchanting than those of Stevenson or Kipling. Perhaps it was what Chesterton calls “the thread of irony which runs through all the solemn impossibilities of the narrative,” which hethought turned the Holmes stories into “a really brilliant addition to the great literature of nonsense.” Perhaps it was the chilly yet reassuring presence of a place that was to become haunted by my daydreams.
    For me, no German city (neither Döblin’s Berlin nor Thomas Mann’s Lübeck) ever had the reality of Conan Doyle’s London: the gaslit rooms in Baker Street, the evil winding streets, the genteel foggy squares. Years later I travelled to London, convinced that I would find that memorable geography. My first shilling-metered bed-sitter above a fish-and-chips shop disabused me.
    I can’t remember my reaction to the discovery that Sherlock Holmes was a cocaine addict. The opening paragraph of
The Sign of Four
, describing the Master taking the bottle “from the corner of the mantelpiece” and the hypodermic syringe “from its neat morocco case,” and then, “with his long, white, nervous fingers” adjusting the “delicate needle” and rolling back “his left shirt-cuff” and finally thrusting “the sharp point home”—all this in the presence of Dr. Watson—gripped me without scandal. (I was far more scandalized by the intrusion of the demonic ghostly dog in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, for instance.) And yet later, in a far different London than the one I thought I loved, enjoying my first chemical hallucinations,I remembered that scene above all. Holmes’s comment to Watson’s criticism—“I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendingly stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment”—rang true. Three more times I took LSD. Then I stopped, not for cautionary reasons but because I felt the experience would simply repeat itself, like watching the same film again, for the fourth time.
    Graham Greene, on the opening paragraph of
The Sign of Four:
“What popular author today could so abruptly introduce his hero as a drug addict without protest from his public? It is only in one direction that we have become a permissive society.”
    Tomorrow I leave for France.
MONDAY
    I find it easy to read, difficult to write in trains.
    This morning, outside the window of the train on my way home, a short, almost imperceptible snowstorm. In the Book of Common Prayer: “He giveth snow like wool.” And “A joyful and pleasant thing it is to be thankful.” I make a mental list of descriptions of snow in books I’ve read and think that, since there are so many, they would not coincide with those of another reader.
LATER
    Holmes as tragic hero, feeling trapped in a stifling world, suffering from the pain of existence. Instances of
Weltschmerz
.
    Holmes: I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was there ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them?
    Faust: God, how these walls still cramp my soul,
This cursed, stifling prison-hole. …
And can you still ask why your heart
Is pent and pining in your breast,
Why you obscurely ache and smart,
Robbed of all energy and zest?
For here you sit, surrounded not
By living Nature, not as when
God made us, but by reek and rot
And mouldering bones of beasts and men.
(David Luke’s translation)
    Prufrock: The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the
      window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on
      the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the
      evening. …
    What is
The Sign of Four
about? The search for balance as a cure