Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.

This explains so much of my early school life.

We were in the same predicament as the Reverend Sydney Smith who, finding himself stuck in the country, wrote to a friend that he could best describe his situation as being ‘simply miles from the nearest lemon’.

I cried tears of joy and laughter. Growing up in endless suburbia, these were my exact sentiments.

Jamie could swarm up ropes like an Arthur Ransome hero, he could fly up window frames, leap vaulting horses, flip elegant underwater turns at the end of each lap of the pool, somersault backwards and forwards off the trapeze and spring back up with his neat little buttocks twinkling and winking with fitness and firmness and cute little Jamieness. Cunt.

For Rossini the sun always breaks out with such a joyful jerk that nothing, for a while, can ever seem bad, not even the stolen money in your pocket that chinks and clinks as you bring in the woodwinds and the brass section, thrashing like an epileptic in your hysterica passio, twitching with spastic arhythmic heaves and thrusts, not even the hard stone of new knowledge that was born in you that day that childhood is over and that something new has come into your being that may well unseat your reason for ever.

Compromise is a stalling between two fools.

Stephen Fry is the Oscar Wilde with a Twitter account and shorter jail sentence.

would need to understand. I did not want him to understand, no adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time, and most passionately of all I did not want him to know about Matthew.

‘Wisdom?’ Ramsay chewed the word around in his mouth. ‘Oh, I should say that wisdom is the ability to cope.’ On that definition, one with which I wholeheartedly concur, I should say my mother is the wiser of my parents.

but love, like all art, as Oscar said, is quite useless. It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.

Didn’t Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to Faust? Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make: the pain and terror we will take from others’ shoulders; our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to

at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, not all that Carrie teenage telekinetic wank, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform. Yet I was unwanted, rejected