Sherlock Holmes
...seems somewhat sacred; I'm sure our literature teacher is in the full
conviction of that. Take a look at our textbook: from Shakespeare to Bacon; two laureate poets
Byron and Tennyson, the ideologist Emerson and the hermit Thoreau, and so on. An amiable and
worshipful lady as she is, she appreciates the grace embodied in the great pieces: what we learned
in her literature course was the most classic and profound sections and chapters. But to tell the
truth, Arnold's lines really confused me, I just couldn't understand what "the eternal note of
sadness"meant; fortunately, after Mrs.Gao's careful illumination, I got a picture - though obscure
- of his profound thinking. Other puzzles are here and there, for instance, "To be or not to be", this
is quite a question that I still don't know what Shakespeare wanted to tell us, even after Mrs.Gao's
explanation. You know, literature is not so easy to comprehend, at least to me. So when decided to
write a substantial paper in a humanities subject - namely, literature - as an engineering student, I
remember Sherlock Holmes. Maybe he is not so difficult to understand to me. I began reading
Holmes when I was a pupil (of course in Chinese version), while even today I still enjoy reading
them, though the plots are really familiar to me, in the original language.
Shakespeare's masterpieces belong to literature, which is needless to say; what I want to tell is
that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories also belong to literature, though not so serious.
There is no denying that a great deal of the literature that was popular in Doyle's time is rightly
forgotten a hundred years later. But some isn't. Stories about the genius detective Sherlock Holmes
are still readable and interesting. Detective novels...
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