The curious case of the Sherlock pilgrims
Why have Sherlock Holmes fans gathered in Switzerland to recreate their hero’s final hours?"The view that I come to is this: what makes Sherlock Holmes uniquely appealing is precisely that (like those others) he is a superhero, but—and here’s the rub—that he is not superhuman. Unlike Superman, Holmes’s powers of “detection” are not beyond those of any human being who can think and observe and draw inference. A large part of the thrill of reading the stories is that when Watson reveals Holmes’s superpowers, they turn out to not be superpowers at all. If only we had studied his methods. From a psychological point of view, therefore, Sherlock is the perfect embodiment of two of our deepest and most contradictory needs: the need for a transcendent and universally redemptive hero, and the need for the truth to be available to everyone."
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