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Tag Archives: Stephen Fry

The Importance of Oscar Wilde

16 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Big Think, comedy, Falstaff, Fiction, Inspiration, Inspriation, language, literature, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Stephen Fry, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray, wit

Oscar Wilde

“It was really Oscar Wilde who awoke language in my head in a way like nobody else, and I think also discovering the kind of man Oscar Wilde was, was an enormous influence as well. The fact that you could be such a towering intellect, such a lord of language and be charming and graceful, kind, good natured, but also unhappy and unlucky was a great discovery for an adolescent — because one of the traps of adolescence is the sort of paranoid resentment that somehow you’re never going to match up and that everybody else’s life is going to be better and finer and fuller. That everyone else attended some secret lesson in which how to live was taught and you had a dental appointment that day or you were somehow not invited.

And the point of great writers like Wilde is that they make that invitation to you. They welcome it. Perhaps the greatest definition I think of character and quality is people who when they’re truly great rather than making you feel they’re tall, they make you feel you’re tall, that they’re greatness as it were improves you. They used to say of Oscar Wilde that when you got done from a dinner table you felt funnier and wittier and cleverer. Now a lot of brilliant people make you feel less funny, less clever, less witty because they’re so clever, witty and funny, but he had the opposite effect. A bit like what Shakespeare said about Falstaff, not just a wit, but a cause of wit in others.”

__________

Stephen Fry, speaking with Big Think about the influence of Oscar Wilde.

As with Fry, Oscar Wilde — specifically in his lone novel The Picture of Dorian Gray — was for me among the first writers who stirred that epiphany, “This is someone whose voice I understand.” Reading that book as a teenager, I found an author who simultaneously connected with, and transcended, my conception of the world.

Wilde’s seminal comedy The Importance of Being Earnest was first performed this week in 1895 at St James’s Theatre in London.

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Infallibility

27 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Religion, Speeches

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Tags

Benedict XVI, Catholicism, Christopher Hitchens, Is Catholicism Good for the World?, Joseph Ratzinger, Stephen Fry, the Vatican

Pope Benedict XVI

I don’t wish any ill on any fellow primate or mammal of mine, so I don’t at all look forward to the death of Joseph Ratzinger, I don’t, or any other pope, not really, except for one tiny reason which I ought to confess and share with you. When he dies, there’s quite a long interval ’til the conclave can meet, and for that whole time, that whole interval — it is a delicious, lucid interlude — there isn’t anyone on Earth who claims to be infallible.

Isn’t that nice?

All I think, all I want to propose in closing is this: that if the human species is to rise to the full height that’s demanded by its dignity, and by its intelligence, we must all of us move to a state of affairs, where that condition is permanent. And I think we should get on with it.

____

It’s the strange thing about the Catholic church, it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we with our permissive society, we are obsessed. No, we have a healthy attitude — we like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly, because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. And the only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that, in erotic terms, is the Catholic Church in a nutshell.

Do you know who would be the last person ever to be accepted as a prince of the Church? The Galileean carpenter. That Jew. They would kick him out before he tried to cross the threshold. He would be so ill-at-ease in the Church. What would he think! What would he think of St. Peter’s? What would he think of the wealth, and the power, and the self-justification, and the wheedling apologies?

__________

From Christopher Hitchens’s and Stephen Fry’s opening statements in their debate on the motion Is the Catholic Church a Force for Good in the World?. If you’re a Catholic, I wouldn’t recommend watching the debate — it’s one of the most decisively one-sided contests I’ve ever seen.

Today is Joseph Ratzinger’s final day as Pope.

Watch Fry’s engrossing opening statement below.

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