Stephen Fry - Full Address

now all I need to do now is introduce our speaker for this evening normally when we invite someone to the union it's because they are particularly famous for something they might won the World Cup they may have acted in a particularly successful film they may have done something truly amazing and sometimes they have said or done something truly terrible every now and then we do invite people who are famous and amazing and worth and invite simply arguably because of the ship their share personality unfortunately Kim Kardashian could not make it and instead I am delighted to welcome tonight and I would ask you all to join me in welcoming the legend that is Stephen Fry dr. Joffe Stowe you have hello June honestly this is incredibly kind of you and I when I was walking here and I saw some of you who did get in and and some of the I saw this little hopeful young eager little twitchy bewhiskered furry little faces beaming up at me I wanted to throw a huge love blanket over all of you it made me so it's incredibly grateful to have gone to Cambridge oh no no no no it made me very very grateful to be in the position where I am and one of the reasons I'm in the position right I'm if I can be so pompous is to put it quite that way is through a man I would put as a candidate there's one of the five greatest Oxonian 'he's an enormous influence on my life not what we would now call British although in his day he was called British and I would I would although this is not a debate I will argue the motion that he is your prince and he is Oscar finger love flirt he wills wild and I just wanted to say a few things about him because he is every year I live he becomes a more and more extraordinary figure you probably know the basic outline that he was born in 1854 on October the 16th I'm boring me with things you so know and only to be retold so it is in fact just past his one hundred and sixtieth birthday he died in November the year 1900 and he was do you want a little vapor rub and he was he was as you probably know he was Irish his father Sir William Wilde was an ophthalmic surgeon and poet sort of and was the ophthalmic surgeon surgeon Royal which meant should the odd occasion arrive where Her Majesty Queen Victoria happened to be in Dublin and happened to succumb to some eye infection he would be the chosen surgeon what while grew up and went to Trinity College Dublin which is where all Protestants went if there were of any sort of ambition and ability in a very sectarian divided country even then or I say even then you know it had been for four hundred five hundred years previously so I'm going to get to the point um he had a tutor called Mahaffey who was considered the greatest classics tutor of his day who sent a letter introducing him to those of anybody here from maudlin yes so I did drag you away from your pheasant pie but anyway he is he he led was written to these you have a president no you have a masters and straightfoward master or maudlin um saying this is the greatest caste system we have ever produced we think could be very proud to have him his name is Oscar Wilde Wilde arrived and promptly won the nudity prize all the prizes that were going and became famous famous in the British press famous all over the country and even in the continent not because he'd written anything particularly extraordinary but because of how he dressed and the way he spoke which was magical right in the middle plumb Spang in the middle of the Victorian era an era of sobriety black frock coats and decency and indignation and a sense of moral purpose and moral superiority he was like an extraordinary butterfly full of color and light vivid and extraordinary paradoxes and even when he was interviewed by the London newspaper in his second year at Oxford he was asked what his ambition was and he said to live up to my collection of blue and white China and he then did you still have Vipers here yeah those of you don't um well you all have vipers do I suppose you can't really in chemistry can you come sort of suddenly make a chemical reaction it's a viper voce stands for live voice it's a kind of examination which isn't written down where you're where you're in examined by tutors and this very much happened in mods and bless you Oh I think that was a sneeze it may have just been an indication of complete disgust and then this I've just walked into a bronchial ward for sake get a grip so he was doing because he was doing this this examination and you had to show that you were familiar not just with classical Greek attic Greek as they call it but also a New Testament Greek the New Testament as I'm sure you know is entirely written in Greek and so in in order to demonstrate this he had to translate its sight and they handed him a New Testament and he read from it fluently translating into English they said thank you mister well that's very good and he carried on translating they said mister well that's terrific thank you very much indeed and he carried on it was the passion the crucifixion of Christ they said mr. Wilde stop you carried on said mr. Wilde put that book down and we'll move on to other things no please let me go on I'm dying to see how it all turns out this is the kind of man and so extraordinary then he left Oxford an explosion of promise and he was going to become a politician this is what everybody's view was and he would be the most brilliant politician of his day would make Disraeli the only person who could compare him with also a flamboyant dandy humane Disraeli look possibly possibly positively in a mothballed and um he arrived and met this woman Constance Lloyd utterly beautiful wonderfully intelligent perfect soul mate and they married and and they were very extraordinary thing happened Gilbert and Sullivan now much less celebrated and they were in their own time wrote one of their operettas and it's called patience and it it makes fun of Oscar Wilde and his set although as I say he had not written anything that we will read now he was so famous simply for the way he dressed a bit like Malcolm McLaren way before you were born was in about 1974 just before Punk Malcolm McLaren was famous for dressing safety pins through his nose things like they then became the manager of the Sex Pistols and everything else sort of caught on from there the very few people become famous simply because of their personality their flamboyance the way they dress the way they talk no one really since Wilde has matched in that manner and so Gilbert Sullivan who was satirist wrote this operator called patient now Richard D'Oyly carte who ran the Savoy opera companies it was called now called Savoy opera because they had built a theater for the next to the hotel which had just been built this is very I'm going off-piste here but it's quite interesting yeah if you like that sort of thing and the Savoy Hotel was the most modern and extraordinary hotel in the world at the time it had lifts it had Escoffier as the chef it had the most remarkable things it would come back to bite poor old Oscar in the bum in a horrible way but at the time Richard D'Oyly carte was an incredibly powerful tharok or producer who did one thing and that he took all his shows to Broadway to America now the problem here was that Wilde was famous in England so everyone could laugh at these characters who like Oscar would go through with a lily in their hand saying everything is too utterly utter there's phrases like that it's too exquisitely adorable and you my darling a more adorable than anybody I've ever met or ever hope to meet and all its kind thing and they turn that into a patter song and everybody would giggle and say oh it's just like those extraordinary young men who walk up and down with a lily in their hand and they walk back again just for the fun of it and to be seen so Richard D'Oyly carte offered Oscar what was the equivalent now of something like two million pounds to go round America for a year lecturing so that he could become famous in America so that patients would become a hit so that's what he did he arrived at the very famous words are the customs shared when asked if he had anything to declare he said I have nothing to declare except my genius and he was asked by Americans were very curious about their own country and the way Britain regarded it because it was only 20 or 25 years our corner was empty our since the civil war the most violent still to this date most mano-a-mano violent deadly war that has ever been waged terms of deaths horrible thought all civil wars are so he pronounced that she found the Atlantic very wet when asked what he thought of it because the journalist with that peculiar oh it's almost a while how do you find the Atlantic I thought it was that he already very wet like oh fantastic he's so witty you know and he went round America giving lectures on two subjects the House Beautiful she's the first recorded instance of somebody lecturing on interior decoration which he did with minut knowledge and extraordinary understanding and the other was the life and works of the great Italian sculptor and silversmith benvenuto cellini who was not well known in in America at all especially amongst the lecture going classes who were by and large as they still are enormously Philistine I would hate you to put your hand up if you've never heard to this day of benvenuto cellini because it would only distress me to think there was anybody in this chamber and I know there isn't who doesn't know exactly who I mean yes I am looking at you by benvenuto cellini the famous salt and pepper set in gold I'm sure you know the one you know it of course you do anyway he was a remarkable man Chilean he wrote his own autobiography he was a criminal he was a destroy Denari figure ana markable choice of course with Rosco to take he went down a silver mine in Leadville Colorado and he held the miners in here was spellbound he held them in absolutes in the palm of his hand and he talked about Chile ninis my god can we talk to this show any guy and Oscar said alas I thought I made it quite clear he's a he's a 16th century few guys quite quite quite dead and then someone at the back said who shot him it's believed by one of his best biographers Richard Ullman that he died of syphilis when he did die in 1900 and that the syphilis was contracted from prostitutes with whom he consulted at that time in America where it was as as common as whiskey really unfortunately syphilis and with course had no cure until invention of penicillin now a lot of you are thinking right hang on Oscar he was gay what's all this about marrying and getting prostitutes and so what maybe come back to that we have a little time one thing I want to make sure is this is queued for eight hours you're going to be bored for eight hours so he he came back to England in a blaze of triumph had to decide whether or not to sit for Parliament meanwhile edited a woman's magazine wrote poems everything was going fine until he came back to this place now why would Oxford be his undoing because he went to see his old college and he saw the old tutors and they all welcomed him a few silly and they introduced him to a young undergraduate whose name was Lord Alfred Douglas who was the younger younger son of the Marquess of Queensbury ancient Scottish family known as the black Douglass's on account of the notorious history of murder-suicide and terrible rages that the clan seemed to be prey of prey to so he met this boy who was unconscionably beautiful completely worshipful and reasonably talented and he fell completely in love with him and he read to him in French because he'd written it in French play that he justs composed called Salome which he had written for Sarah Bernhardt the greatest actress of her day though to be perfectly frank he had written it for Sarah Bernhardt because he says in the foreword of the translation to write a play for an actor or actress would be the work of an artist not an artist so he regarded himself naturally as an artist but Alfred Douglas had no inhibitions he had the full cruel absolute garlis self-confidence of the Victorian era Stoke rat he was utterly without concealment which is quite admirable in some ways he was utterly without shame which is also admirable in some ways he was utterly without any sense of obligation to anybody else which is perhaps less admirable so before the airplane crashes into the chamber I will wrap up this love story which seems so promising and so wonderful he he and Lord Alfred hid London doing during the VAX the vacations and they became lovers and the word homosexual didn't exist it simply did not exist as a word the first sexologist of the day hadn't given a name to those that love their own kind as it's often was often put or invert as it was sometimes called perverts also I turned about the abominable crime of buggery had been on the statute books for hundreds of years and around this time only ten years earlier had been emotional impoundment called the lab will share amendment which was passed which was actually a law against prostitution which at the last minute had sort of sort of slipped into it a law against sodomy or indecent behavior between those between men actually not between women at all because it is rumoured though never substantiated that Queen Victoria simply didn't believe that women would ever do such a thing and if they did how would they do it it's not my position my position literally but it's not my place to put myself in the mind agreement or anybody else but it was lucky for our lesbian sisters that they never had to go through that though they did have of course much else to go through in the net in the following century as did all kinds of transgender people and I wouldn't want to take that lightly because I'll get Twitter if I do about anything else I'm busy as as lord alfred was nicknamed but was was deficit because he had a I'm sure you all have chip rooms in your rooms in college no that's Cambridge so you ask outs you call them didn't you sorry Scouts you haven't you have a sculpture and bless you is it just going on like a tennis match that's you bless you bless you bless you this fine um so you have Scout rooms in your rooms yeah yeah those are gyms I don't know why they awful but anyway they really existed then you actually had a scout who would you know start your collars and so on and I saw the tail end of this one when I had a we had bed as you I'm sure you have that and and would clean your rooms and this better had a father who had been a Cambridge I'm really sidestepping which is quite interesting and I out of that ludicrous middle-class guilt you have when you're being served by people sort of babbled on to a mrs. G her name was which was kind of amusing because it's a poem by WH Auden and that doesn't make it amusing I'd want her talking about it not the music at all that just happened to be her name and so I said I'd really like to meet her father because she'd said all my my dad's got so many stories about the University in the old days before the war I said oh I'd love to meet him so she brought him along one day to my room and I checked her so I said to him is any difference between the cameras now in the carriage when you were a ship and you really were said well he said I suppose the major thing I'd say is in the old days the gentleman would change there under linen about two or three times a week and their shirts and collars about two or three times a day and now it's the other way around they were it sort of throwing the history of the world through the skidmark is a listen if it is that which is of humanity is my subject as whoever it was a Roman poet or something said nothing that is of us is is out of bands especially in a chamber of learning and distinguished thought and duration as this so bosy writes to ask her in a panic because he's being he's being blackmailed by his Scout his Scouts younger brother I think with whom he had improper relations and he'd written him a letter and Oscar said pay pay no attention and then this same young man went around to see Oscar in London said I've got the letter that Lord Alfred wrote and I've got another one that you wrote to Lord Alfred since those rose-leaf lips made for the madness of kisses is that the right thing for a gentleman to be writing to another gentleman Oscar said it's a very beautiful thing for one gentleman to write to another gentleman said I know some people will pay a lot of money for a for a liver a letter like that and Oscar said and I suggest you see them how much money you're talking about civil war two hundred pounds well then you must see them at once it is more than I have ever been offered for a prose work of that length and rather confused in battle the man gave him the letter so you're impossible to rent those days meant to blackmail well we go little further forward he has two children Oscar Cyril and Vivian salutely adorable the short story of Cyril which is very sad is he was just old enough to know what was going on when Oscar was on trial and when the first world war broke out he hurled himself into it 100 years ago holed himself into it because his name and his all that have been changed people knew he was the son of Oscar and he didn't want to be associated with that and he died in the first week of the war he was so desperate to prove himself a man whatever that thing may be complicated thing so we move a little further forward to a time when Beau's his father the market of Queensbury who invented what I'm sure you've heard of the Queensbury rules started going around to see Oscar and said you you must stop seeing my son you must stop seeing him absolutely and entirely forever and wild basically threw him out of your house in tight Street in Chelsea where he lived and it got to a pass where wild started writing plays that at last began to make his name as a genuine creative craftsman in fact it's an odd statistic that during the 19th century more theaters were built in London that had ever been built in the world up until that point and yet there are no theatrical pieces that have any virtue or magnificence that were written during that period except that last forever except the importance of being honest there's no Victorian masterpieces except that one single play everything else in melodramas comedies that make no sense to us and it was on the first night of that very play that order Laura was its father the marks of Queensbury went round backstage with rotten cabbages and tomatoes and things he was going to throw on stage at the end he was barred by the stage doorman have been warned he went to the Albemarle Club which Oscar was a member of and wrote on a card to Oscar Wilde posing as a sodomite which his own car with marks of Queensbury written above it printed put it in an unsealed envelope and put to mr. Oscar Wilde on gave it to the porter when Wilde went to the club the next day he was given this card he opened it and read it now do you mean someone writing to ask awhile posing as a sodomite in fact to be strictly accurate he was so illiterate and baser man the Marquis of Queensbury Asbury they would actually written some de might and he got the word right but while I thought it was a dreadful libel because it was an open card that could have been seen by member of the staff Lord Alfred saw it is his opportunity to get at the father he despised Lord Alfred's older brother Francis had killed himself over an affair that he had had with Lord Rosebery who was then foreign secretary and Queensbury was maddened by the fact that he couldn't get at Lord Queensbury because Lord Queensbury was too powerful that Jew queer Rosebery he called him rose we became Prime Minister the Prime Minister just before Salisbury I think historians here would put me right and queen and queens we saw his chance he may not be able to get Rose Barry who calls his eldest son Francis to commit suicide but he could get this Irish nobody who had no place in society was only an artist to commit nothing he could get him and not Alfred thought I can get my father for being such a brutal tyrannical beast so the court case took place where wild sued the Marquess of Queensbury for libel it was such a disaster so many witnesses appeared particularly those staff members of the Savoy Hotel so I told you was to return to bite him in the bunk where he'd spent many a happy afternoon and weekend with Lord Alfred and with indeed with red voice and the testimony which so shocked European audiences involved the stains on bed linen for us it's almost unimaginable even today to think this is these things are raised in court to a Victorian who never read these things in newspapers to whom these things were never discovered ascared jury they were cool it's what stains and the mind leaps to all kinds of astonishing conclusions and there is no powder with power enough to shift those stains even Cillit bang bang and the dirt is still there so the case collapsed midway through Oscar Wilde was given the the perfect opportunity to to escape because that was the gentlemanly thing to do you go to France it happened a little later with Lord Beecham who famously was the model of Lord Marchmain in that absolutely unbeatable Oxford novel Brideshead Revisited which if you've read you'll know not much man is is the father of Sebastian Flyte and who dies of drunkenness and and it's a magnificent story and lore Marchman is based on on this extraordinary girl or Beecham who turned out to be what Gaia's would now say but what kinds of words were used in him he fled to Europe because the police were on his heels king george v to his king at the time memorably said i thought men like that shot themselves which is pretty much a half the upper class is regarded such things especially if they reared their head in public as well so Wilde was given this chance he went to the Cadogan Hotel in London called a pawn Street and Sloane Street and Glen Avenue and he he awaited events to unfold his great friend said Oscar you must go is the last train takes you down to Dover off the train onto the boat onto a train to Paris Oscar spoke French completely fluent clear he was the first person to draw the world's attention in the english-speaking world attention to to Dostoevsky to flow bare to all kinds of world literature but now he stayed and in the words of John Benjamin's Marvis poem the policeman arrived in Cadogan hotel mr. Wilde we have come / to take you we're felons and criminals dwell we must ask you to come with us quietly for this is the Cadogan hotel and he went and he was sentenced to two years imprisonment at hard labor the judge mr. justice wills said this is the worst case I have ever tried he had not preach not long previously tried a case of child murder that's how much Wilde was despised he said it is my duty to impose upon you the maximum sentence the Lorelei's which in my opinion is not nearly harsh enough you must go to prison for two years of hard labor take him down his solicitor had told him that if the maximum sentence were what were given he it would be two years hard labor Oh to which he added a sentence to which someone of your class on upbringing for them you will be unlikely to survive it but Wilde took it he was an extraordinary strong man Dublin a group of rugby players had come to break up his famous collection of blue and white china they had stormed up the stairs had picked up the first one and like a sort of skittle alley had thrown him and all the others who tumbled down to the bottom of the stairs with a snapping of collarbones he stood there with his hands on his hips said well boys that's enough of that game if you want to troop quietly into my room I shall make you toast with anchovy butter and tell you stories and they all meekly went up and listened him telling stories sitting by the fire was an unbelievably captivating man Conan Doyle who met him at a dinner described in a much later autobiography he said that this was the most brilliant speaker I have ever heard ever heard some people when they speak they make you feel that talk because they're so brilliant sorry they make you feel that talk is they're so brilliant yeah they know so much more than you they're so much more capable of speech than you are you think oh my god I shall never match this others bring you up to their height because because their talk is all-encompassing and all in gauging what Shakespeare said had full stuff not just a wit but a cause of which in others so he survived his sentence he came out and lived a terrible exile under the name of Sebastian Mel moth based based on walter scott's exile figure Sebastian mal moth the wanderer and he died in Paris utterly forgotten man despised loathed hated and I just put this proposition to you have gone on much longer than my egg wanted me to but I felt it was worth it that he's a kind of I'd said Prince and if I wanted to go further I would say a kind of Messiah he had followers disciples some of whom were loyal to him to the very last utterance others of whom betrayed him fled pretended they never knew him like Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane and a thing that is much less known about him like the Christ figure we read about in the Bible he he also told parables there's a wonderful one on Rashid the French novelist who in fact is to be congratulated for first using the word homosexual in his book corridor where he's at least using it in the sense of a class of person who has a desire for their own sex that is their primary impulse because wild never fell out of love with his wife he never considered it once there's a word for it you suddenly feel you have to put your foot and then the other foot on that side of a line rather than just falling in love with people you have to fall in love with its specific gender or sex which is of course not necessarily how we would any one of us would have been weather gales straight if we'd been born 200 years ago we would have thought that's an attractive person I really would love to give that person of Thoroughly King and then then you then he would say afterwards hang on that's a chap that can't be right well right go on the seventh give it a crack see what happens um and that's more or less how how you would sort of go through life but once there's a word for it you go home hello that means I'm a homosexual well I can't I can't be that because it's against law because it's disgusting because it's against this religion it's been generally wrong so suddenly you're a noun instead of a verb and as the philosopher T Hume constantly employed he died in the first war as well he said there are no nouns in the universe which any physicists here would I'm sure would agree with everything is a process everything T Hume use the wonderful phrase a concrete flux of inter penetrating intensities is rather good isn't it you can have that for your next essay it gets a sort of underlining with pretentious but it's still pretty cool concrete flux inter penetrating intensities that's what we all are verbs we happen we don't were not nouns even tables or process there being a table stabili more or less in time we are being ourselves more or less stable in time so while tell this great I think fantastic parable some was being at the dinner table he said the devil was walking one day they won't turn to look at him so the devil was walking one day in the Libyan desert and he saw a group of young demons and they were tormenting a priest a monk and he watched them and the monk was holding steady and he approached they all bowed down and said master and he said what happens here this is well master here is a holy man of God member of the church and we have offered him so much if he will turn against his Christ and his God we have offered him powers and principalities we have offered him money and riches and gorgeous things we had offered him love knowledge we have offered him everything but he stays true to his church he is truly a man of God for 39 days and 39 nights we have tempted him still he holds fast and the devil said out of the way and he whispered in the monks here and instantly the monk snapped his petrol cross in to rent his garments asunder and shrieked imprecations against his God in his church filling the air and most vile hideous profane speech and the demons bow done is had truly master you are our Lord what can you have said in five seconds when we had tried 39 days and 39 nights is it all was very simple I merely told him that his brother had been made Bishop of Alexandria that that to me is it true parable because it absolutely reflects the human spirit but I want you to go back to wild dying in Paris and he your rightful you watch it I'm sorry I have gone on but I hear you've got to try and give up and save Ali for money but at least you know he there he is um a little later on he begins slowly to gain a name for himself and a fantastic Yaakov Epstein sarcophagus is erected at Pella shares cemetery the great cemetery of Paris where most of the great French writers are buried and philosophers and of course most famously if you like your rock and roll Jim Morrison of the doors and set my pants on fire no that's not that was another band it was one of those you know they had a hit um no they were big they like William Blake they were really good he wore tight trousers but Oscar was there and his name was a hissing and a byword as they used to say um and something very extraordinary happened and I liken it to what I call I don't know if it's parallax is the right word you're probably mathematicians and physicists amongst you will tell me it's not the right word but it's just an effect a very obvious effect if you are going down if you happen to know New York City if you're going down Fifth Avenue she's one of the avenues that goes downtown as opposed to up like its neighbors Madison to the to the east and and you have any of the Americas to the west and it goes downtown now you think why is this relevant well you passed 33rd 34th Street the whole block is taken up by one vast building which for something like 22 years or something was the tallest building in the world the Empire State Building and of course the first time you go to America you're incredibly excited you're in New York you're going down Fifth Avenue in seven says do you go past 33rd 34th you'll see the Empire State Building and you whiz past we just see the frontage that the marquee is they called America which says Empire State building's gone so you look out of the back window and what do you see well it's a bit like this effect in a way there's a little building really tiny building that's in front of it but Europe there so the little tiny building completely obscures the huge building now if you're very lucky and it's late at night unlike most British traffic lights American traffic lights are beautifully synchronized so once you hit a green run and there's not much traffic you zoom down so the effect is that all the small buildings suddenly achieve their real size and the Empire State Building achieves its real size and the effect is that it launches like a rocket like a rocket bearing a satellite just because you think it can't get any taller it's insane because all these closer buildings are diminishing these little pygmies with Oscar Wilde died in 1900 and the pygmies were regarded as great names we've completely forgotten now people who wrote plays called things like the second mrs. Tanqueray and no orchids from his blandish things like that places were very rarely performed except as a joke and he himself has become the Empire State building's got bigger and bigger and bigger and that the thing I want to say because it moves me intensely and I think of the intellect or the life of the mind I think of being an emotional thing quite as much as it is anything else is that over the enormous number it seems now that I've been more or less in the public eye whatever that means I have been invited to universities and schools and colleges and occasionally you're in the rooms of some twinkly young little hamster that has invited you there for a cup of wine you know they arranged the rains evening or whatever well you're just there for a you know a little comfortable shag or something and um ignore me and when I first started doing that the posters on the wall you almost could go in with your eyes shut you knew what they'd be che guevara that photograph Karl Marx that one with a huge bushy beard maybe John Lennon the imagine cover cover of the album not somebody covering the track maybe Lennon maybe Jimi Hendrix and a sort of electrified version of kind of neon sort of version of Jimi Hendrix because students believed that the world was going to be saved it would be saved by political revolution and rock-and-roll we don't believe that anymore the the fall of the Berlin Wall United you know the United States of the Soviet Union that the Warsaw Pact as it was known proved themselves to be an utterly busted flush totally vicious totally cruel whatever the ideals behind it had long since disappeared you would have to you'd have to curl yourself so tight into a reflexive ball of ignorance and stupidity to think that Soviet Russia could be admired as anything and guiding the way towards freedom or indeed even Karl Marx for that matter and similarly music had become occasionally enjoyable occasionally creative but far from the liberating spirit it was in the days of Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon so instead I started to notice the two most common figures to be on the walls now I know it's Justin Bieber so it's a whole different deal but the most common figures to be on the walls of a student's rooms would be Albert Einstein and Oscar Wilde because they now believed we all now believe that if the world is to be saved it won't be through rock'n'roll it won't be through political revolution it will be through the life of the mind and that life of the mind can be expressed in terms of someone like Einstein whose concepts most of us fail to understand even if spelled out repetitively under different titles by Brian Cox we still don't really get it and it's no good being enthusiastic we don't speak maths and we'd love to but we don't but we can look at that lined humanitarian face of Einstein's either the one with his tongue poking out or or another one and we can see a humanity we can see a brilliance we can see a freedom of thought which now more than ever is the most highly prized thing we have who would have thought that by the 21st century the freedom of thought was even up for questioning but it is there are huge sections of society that think we should not be free to think what we do think and certainly shouldn't be free to express it even in a chamber which is made for expressing the the inexpressible the the purpose of what Oscar in a letter to bosey the most famous and brilliant letter ever written called De Profundis which she wrote in prison means from the deeps out of the depths De Profundis it's an extraordinary letter and if you do nothing else in your remaining time in Oxford read that letter it's the most beautiful thing but he said to bosie in a recriminate or e way because posy was the one who put him there who never even visited him in prison once he said to him that you failed to get a degree at Oxford is perfectly understandable many great minds failed to get a degree what is not forgivable is that you fail to acquire what is sometimes called the Oxford Manor which I take to mean the ability to play gracefully with ideas the ability to play gracefully with ideas isn't that a magnificent thing do you think you've got that it wouldn't that be great to have that the ability to play gracefully with ideas so there's Albert Einstein Bertie once down on the left and on the right is Oscar usually that tinged with green photograph with a slightly melancholy full lipped face and you realize when you're told you you know for a fact that after Shakespeare he is in many many countries the most translated and read English language author from from Britain from the British Isles on an island and that's astonishing thing in Romania and Japan is highly prized but also this height is achieved I would say he now stands as the King of Bohemia that land you should never ever leave the land that all students are issued a visa to when they they go through the gates of their university your Bohemians it means that you're free with your ideas you're free with your thoughts you're free to try things out and you never want to give that visa back you make sure you either Forge it so you keep it till you're 80 because you don't want to become bourgeoisie fide and owner lawnmower never ever owned a lawnmower it's the moment you die inside we don't want that of you too sparkly and tweetly and so I put it to you before I turn to my hang Oscar is the Prince of all students the student Prince so hold this fellow Oxonian very dear in your hearts thank you you

Channel: OxfordUnion

Views: 1,009,143

Rating: 4.833631 out of 5

Keywords: Union, Society, University, Debates, Debating, Interview, Stephen Fry (Celebrity)

Id: IporlmXXDeY

Length: 44min 9sec (2649 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2015