What does it mean, to lose one's mind? Where does it go? If a man is out of his mind, where is he? What is insane when the world is mad by contrast?

I took to the Bodleian Library as to a lover and ... would sit long hours in Bodley's arms, to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.

What does it mean, to lose one's mind? Where does it go? If a man is out of his mind, where is he? What is insane when the world is mad by contrast?

I felt instantly at home, and wanted only to dismiss Alistair, along with the rest of Justice Hall, that I might have a closer look at the shelves.I had to content myself instead with a strolling perusal, my hands locked behind my back to keep them from reaching out for Le Morte D'Arthur, Caxton 1485 or the delicious little red-and-gilt Bestiary, MS Circa 1250 or.... If I took one down, I should be lost. So I looked, like a hungry child in a sweet shop, and trailed out on my guide's heels with one longing backward glance.

Holmes had cultivated the ability to still the noise of the mind, by smoking his pipe and playing nontunes on the violin. He once compared this mental state with the sort of passive seeing that enables the eye, in a dim light or at a great distance, to grasp details with greater clarity by focusing slightly to one side of the object of interest. When active, strained vision only obscures and frustrates, looking away often permits the eyes to see and interpret the shapes of what it sees. Thus does inattention allow the mind to register the still, small whisper of the daughter of the voice.

Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses. But there's nothing like a book.

But a topee is not a turban, and I had been my teacher's pupil before I became my husband's wife, learning to my bones that half a disguise is none at all...The moment my short-cropped, pomade-sleek, unquestionably masculine hair passed beneath his nose was the closest thing I've ever seen Holmes to fainting dead away.