Plurk paste

“I am lost without my Boswell,” Holmes says—Sherlock Holmes, who is never lost—and that says worlds about John Watson. Reading the stories as a lonely child, Watson embodied one of my most desperate hopes: the hope that even someone awkward and prickly could have a best friend.

His presence was a powerful charm. He was kind and brave and he always saw the good in his bizarre companion. And he didn’t just write about Holmes—he was a partner and an equal participant in the man’s adventures. Although he was meant to stand in for the audience in many ways, the “normal” person through whom we saw an unusual talent, he was far from normal himself.

Like the mysterious Irene Adler, Watson bears multiple faces for me; like the faces of Irene Adler, every Watson is someone I have loved.

When Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes describes Jude Law’s Watson as “someone on whom I can thoroughly rely”—and when the same Watson insists, in a strained voice, that “I must be psychologically damaged”—I see my father. Both of them are upright, intelligent, and organized; both of them have had to put up with a holy terror of a housemate. In Law’s performance I recognize the same unshakeable strength and flashes of sincere tenderness that have permeated our relationship, as well as the frustration that must come from being part of the support network for a non-neurotypical family member.

My younger sister, perpetually exasperated and only grudgingly impressed, comes to mind when I re-read A Study in Scarlet. Her own talents are far more concentrated and directed than my own, and like our late mother she doesn’t tolerate a lot of what Watson refers to as “brag and bounce” from anyone—even though she’s had to sit through enormous amounts of it from her weirdo sibling. She’s also been the voice of the outside world to me at times: though I have more of Holmes’s failings than his brilliance, I tend to be the kind of person who ignores solar-system-level information in favor of much more specific details. Like Watson, my sister has often had to bring general knowledge crashing down on me whether I wanted it or not.

But in a much less directed sense, there is something of the good doctor in all of my most solid relationships. When, in Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes tells Watson that he’s “a conductor of light”, I respond not on an intellectual but an emotional level. As someone who has often felt uncomfortably full of unfocused energy, I am at my most frustrated and unproductive when I’m alone. A small filament of kindness or love is all the impetus it takes to draw that energy and shape it into something shining.

John Watson is the cousin who held me while I sobbed out my grief over my mother’s death. He is the best friend who told me, angrily, that she wished she could destroy my depression because she hated seeing me miserable. He is the shoulder I lean on when I am unsteady, and the person I call when I need someone to yell at me about meeting deadlines or going to the gym. And ultimately, he is what I hope to be in my best moments: stalwart and generous, helping the people I love most to shine.