The Last Thoughtful Man

You know how you sometimes read an interview and there's a moment of rare clarity and really thoughtful insight? Well I got about four of those moments in The Onion AV Club's interview with Stephen Fry:

• On Darwin: "People still don't get how astounding Darwinism is. People think what shocked everybody was that Charles Darwin seemed to be saying we had descended from apes. Well, yes, that's what the public and the cartoonists believe. But actually, what was shocking about it was that it said 'all life is struggle'...The discovery of that was profoundly shattering to the late 19th century and early 20th century. "
• On writing about the Holocaust: "I know my publishers wanted me to write a foreword to Making History saying, 'Look, I am a Jew. I think I have a right to address this.' But once you start having to say, 'Look, this is the number of my family killed in the Holocaust. That gives me the right to discuss it and to think about it, then it becomes ridiculous. The Holocaust has no meaning if it doesn't affect us all."
• On being a dilettante (or maybe promiscuity, it's hard to tell): "There's always the danger - there's a very dismissive British phrase, 'Jack of all trades and master of none.' But who wants to be the master of one trade, rather than having fun doing lots of things? The best evidence is that we're all just going to be on this planet once. So we might as well taste as many fruits of as many trees of as many orchards as there are in the world."
• On why the time is ripe for the ascendancy of the First Sea Lord: "Well, the Che Guevara picture has become a piece of retro-chic now, and with the death of communism and so on, nobody really believes that any kind of genuine revolutionary politics can change the world. After the shooting of John Lennon and the early death of so many great stars and the utter naked venal mercantile marketing of pop music and rock music, I don't think anyone really believes that music is anything more than another commodity. Now, if you go to a student's room, I think the chances are if they have posters on the wall, they will be of Oscar Wilde, or maybe Albert Einstein [if you don't believe him, look at this]. The life of the mind, whether the mind of an artist or of a scientist, is what students perhaps believe in more now. The radical thing to be is a thinker and an artist who can find a way of reshaping our way of looking at reality."