Michael Yon and Sherlock Holmes

Michael Yon's latest post is up, this is the link to his website. The email with the link arrived last night and it's still sitting in my mailbox, unclicked, unread. I just know it's going to be hard to take and I want to live in my happy bubble for one more day.

Every post he writes tells about something new or under reported. He's always teaching about what he himself has learned and it oft times makes for very uncomfortable reading. His writing style is unlike anything on the web, both very intimate and compelling, which makes the sad information all the more devastating.

Some of the discussion at work yesterday revolved around basic human needs, including the fundamental need to be desired. We got very esoteric and academic and it was great fun.

Michael writes as if he's moved on beyond that. He doesn't have any insecurity about being desired so he's comfortable letting his guard down in a way that no guy I've ever known has done. I've perceived that kind of higher consciousness among the great artists and I believe Michael's on a level with some of the finest writers and poets of the last couple of centuries. We get to live and watch him develop as an artist and this must have been what it was like to live in the days when Yeats published his poetry or the Beatles launched a new album.

Also, possibly, similar to the public reactions to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's literary creation, Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle didn't write the Holmes stories with anything like the attention to detail he gave to his more "literary" works. But Sherlock caught the imagination of the public and so he would be induced to write another, even bringing Holmes back from the dead after trying to kill him off. To this day, tons of readers revel in the Holmes stories and there are biographies and books of literary criticism still storming the book charts.

I don't believe any great work of artistic merit is easily produced. Some artists make it look easy and some probably think they didn't work that hard but great art, like great love, takes a long time to develop.

"It was the end of November, and Holmes and I sat, upon a raw and foggy night, on either side of a blazing fire in our sitting-room in Baker Street..."There only remains one difficulty. If Stapleton came into the succession...how could he claim it without causing suspiciion and inquiry?"

"It is a formidable difficulty, and I fear that you ask too much when you expect me to solve it. The past and the present are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer."

The Hound of the Baskervilles, page 145, first published August 1901.