A Scandal in Bohemia, (A Sherlock Holmes’s story,) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
On Irene Adler
(via profoundish)
To Sherlock Holmes she is always /the/ woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. 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. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer — excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. 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 own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.
This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.
I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love.
There are some things one cannot seize by realism, but by sheer poetry. I feel there is too much naturalism; It obscures moods, feelings, psychic states. I am fond of the lower depths, the underworlds. I never find myself fitting in a well assembled series of realistic events. I much rather prefer growth in an atmosphere of music, books and artists, always constructing, creating, writing, drawing, inventing plays, acting in them, writing a diary, living in created dreams as inside a cocoon, dreams born of reading, always reading, growing, disciplining myself to learn, to study, skirting abysses and dangers with incredible innocence, the body always sensitive but in flight from ugliness. I want to remain sincere and surround my innermost world with romance.
Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don’t care what you’ll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.