A/N: Written at the beginning of 2012 in an attempt to make sense of Sherlock. Reviews are more than welcome! Unbeta'd.
Disclaimer: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is to have all credit for the creation of the character Sherlock Holmes.
There is a saying - probably accredited to the wrong source, and most likely mutated into something beyond recognition since its creation – that wisdom is first and foremost acknowledgement of how much one does not know.
Sherlock does not consider himself wise. His experiences of the unknown differ too greatly from the norm, and would thus not correctly represent what speakers of modern English call wisdom. Perhaps there one day will be words for his experiences.
The knowledge of the unknown makes itself known to Sherlock through white spots on the map. They've been starkly apparent almost as long as he's been self-conscious. An answer to a question would only yield so much in term of conveyed and useful information, he could himself never properly catalogue in words his observations of the most insignificant of objects, and as many pages there was in a book they could never compare to the number of those never written.
When details come together in a coherent picture as fast as they do for people like Sherlock (Mycroft) the dead ends crop up quickly; the logical fallacies, the weak arguments, the hairline cracks in assumptions and theories. And if you know where to push, any wall will crumble, opening up a way into uncharted territory.
There are a lot of there dead ends. Some go unnoticed; some are purposefully built to satisfy someone, even carefully tended to although a second glance should make them topple.
Then there are the open roads, where the rubble of olds walls lies unnoticed, where nobody has bothered to take the first step into the unknown. Almost as if to spite him.
So, yes, Sherlock is, in the strictest sense of the word, wise. He does not care for it.
He has mapped out cities and citadels, simulations of reality, driven by an inner force seemingly in no need of replenishing. Despite this, it would not be feasible in his lifetime to break through all the dead ends he knows of, so instead he picks them he finds most useful for his goals (stave off the boredom, just find something, anything that keeps it at bay and keep at it until the body breaks and he thinks no more) and gets to work with them, maps the unfamiliar landscape on his own, drinking data, constructing theories and conducting experiments.
He has only involuntarily turned to introspection, when he finds himself without challenges. But not aided by various chemical substances (turns him off, like a computer on standby), his body begins itching, the walls of his cranium seemingly crushing the brain inside (sensory overload, no use of the information constantly pouring into him, filling him to the brim, reducing him to an empty container standing at the bottom of a waterfall).
The problem with memorizing things the first time you hear it, is that a second repeat can at most serve as a confirmation that you committed the correct facts to memory, while the tenth repetition is the tenth stroke of sandpaper across naked skin. Social norms, bodily function, daily habits, all repeated in absurdum, until they lose even the illusion of meaning or pleasure.
Crime has a tendency to keep his focus. Not in itself, the concept's continued existence is as grating a fact to him as the sun's continued cycles – but it implies imbalance, desperation, the snap and crackle of that which normally frustrates him with its continuity and predictability, on and on into eternity. It takes the dull mind of one of the living bodies walking past him in the street, and gives it a colour, a flame. What does the perpetrator do? Why does he do it? How does he do it? And how does the victim respond to such an extreme situation? What do they think? How do they act? In the last moments of their meaningless, empty lives (because it is and why don't people see it – stupid), what do people do?
People, yes. Sherlock is an observer of people. The never-ending game.
Had he gone into physics, the technology to prove his theories' existence could be centuries into the future.
Had he gone into history, his theorization would in turn be foiled by documents lost centuries into the past.
But people. They are everywhere. They are here and now while Sherlock lives and breathes and thinks - each one a representative example of the whole, because he does not care about the group, the family, the nation and what the individual says about them. He only cares what the individual says for itself.
You find yourself in a dead end. Do you break through the wall?
"Oh god, yes."
And he smiles.