Fiction can poison the mind

In your world, you were supposed to care, you were supposed to show an interest in all realms of human knowledge, to study math as well as penmanship, music as well as science and your much-admired Holmes was saying no, some things were more important than others, and the unimportant things should be tossed away and forgotten, since they served no purpose except to clutter one's mind with useless bits of nothing. Some years later, when you found yourself losing interest in science and math, you recalled Holmes's words - and used them to defend your indifference to those subjects. An idiotic position, no doubt, but you nevertheless embraced it. Further proof, perhaps, that fiction, can indeed, poison the mind.