I am a scholar and teacher of literature, with a DPhil in English from Oxford University. My videos are about authors and the places that matter to them. Ultimately, I hope to bring us closer to the times and texts of authors through "pilgrimages" to different places around the world.
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I remember seeing this scene for the first time. I was absolutely struck by it. David Lean! ♥
Clever I had forgotten about the blockage.
obviously the church didn't want percy's tomb, he's naked, you can't display a naked willy in a churchyard the old ladies would have fainted
"his work is simply human, and it belongs to all of us" such a great line and a great video!
Thanks, Lindsey! I don't script these videos much in advance (I really should, but I'm not that organised!) so a lot of what I say comes to me on the day / on location... glad that line worked for you!
Great channel just subscribed, thank you!
Thank so much! I appreciate the support
This one is my favorite so far. And my opinion is obviously objective and totally unbiased.
Wonderful reading of a very beautiful poem, Gabriel. The way you've captured Scarborough here, I can definitely understand why Anne thought the sea air might strengthen her a bit.
Thanks, Nathan! Yes, it was a happy and safe place for her so a natural place to go to when she was ill. Sad that it didn't actually help but at least she died in a place she loved. At some point I might return to Scarborough and talk more about Anne's life there, not just her death. I'm beginning to think we focus too much on famous people's deaths and not enough on their lives!
I think you’re right, we do have a greater fascination with their deaths. Perhaps an interest in how they face that moment. It would be nice to know more about Anne’s life there as well.
Great video, thank you!
I like your channel very much. Thank you.
Thanks very much for visiting and the lovely comment! I will have another video up next Friday and then have a break for a bit (new videos take a long time for me to film and edit) but then more a bit later in the year.
That ill-gotten graveyard full of contagion - if only they knew - We can cure these diseases today of course, my Dad was one of the last to suffer before the cure was found at last. it often seems to be the price they had to pay for their genius, This disease often seems to have been the catalyst for their work. DH Lawrence, Kathleen Mansfield, Keats and many others all suffered from it. victims all of the fire that they fed off. Was it a price worth paying? Who can say. We have the eternal work.
Absolutely -- tuberculosis is such a horrible disease and we're lucky to have proper treatments for it, now. Poor Keats suffered terribly. And it struck Anne down cruelly. Kafka also had it (for about 7 years). I'm reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar at the moment and a character in that gets it! And yet it's something we generally don't think about anymore. Interesting comment about it being the price for genius. That was broadly how Kafka thought of his illness -- that it was the overflow of his feelings. "When the heart and soul can no longer bear the burden, the lungs take over half of it, and then the burden is more or less evenly distributed," he wrote in a letter. Whereas I think Anne just feels her illness was unfair, sad, and rotten luck. Which of course it was.
George Orwell I believe also died of TB
@@Justagirlok101 Interesting -- I did not know that. Amazing how many people it affected and now we don't think about it much at all (treatments are vastly better, today). You may be interested in an article Prof. Adam Roberts wrote about William Morris's death where he speculates about a possible TB diagnosis: medium.com/adams-notebook/what-killed-william-morris-cf48b6666b4b
@@GabrielSchenk yes I believe he was writing 1984 on the remote Scottish island of Jura and he took very sick and had to hike to the road so he could be taken to hospital and died not long after. Thank you for this article looks interesting!
LOvely and moving tribute to Anne in her last days. I have always felt so sorry for their father, who lived to see the deaths of his wife, all six of his children, and, in the death of the pregnant Charlotte, a never to be born grandchild. Such a desperately sad story.
Thanks! And absolutely; the Reverend Patrick Brontë suffered from such enormous loss. The bit where Anne says she doesn't want to die partly for her and her family member's sake, and how they buried her in Scarborough to make it easier for her father, was very moving. And this letter where Rev. Brontë describes the grief but uses it to draw closer to God (as Anne herself did): "tender sorrow was my daily portion; that oppressive grief sometimes lay heavy on me and that there were seasons when an affectionate, agonizing something sickened my whole frame [...] And when my dear wife was dead and buried and gone, and when I missed her at every corner, and when her memory was hourly revived by the innocent yet distressing prattle of my children, I do assure, my dear sir, from what I felt, I was happy at the recollection that to sorrow, not as those without hope, was no sin; that our Lord himself had wept over his departed friend, and that he had promised us grace and strength sufficient for such a day.'"
I like that people leave pens and pencils as a token.
Me too... I've been to a lot author graves and Anne's is one of the ones with a lot of offerings. It's not possible to do that for the other Brontë's as they are buried inside Haworth church, so maybe Anne gets all the attention that would otherwise have been distributed between herself and her sisters.
Great video. Is it true that, before dying, Kafka asked all his writings to be burned?
Thanks so much! And yes, that's right. He wrote to his friend Max Brod and asked him to burn everything. He also asked his last lover, Dora, to burn some of his work and notebooks which she did in front of him (but actually held some back in secret. However, these were unfortunately seized by the Nazis later on, and went missing). Brod rejected Kafka's wishes for two reasons: 1) Kafka had already asked him and he had already refused, so Brod reasoned that Kafka KNEW he wasn't going to do it and therefore wasn't really asking him to do it when he made the request a second time in his Last Will, and 2) the work was just too good to burn (it included, among other things, Kafka's three unpublished novels which otherwise would have been entirely lost). It's still unclear to me how serious Kafka was in the request, and to what extent it was his depression and anxiety speaking. Dora wrote: "Time and again he said: 'Well, I wonder if I've escaped the ghosts?' This was the name with which he summarized everything that had tormented him before he came to Berlin. He was as though possessed by this idea; it was a kind of sullen obstinacy. He wanted to burn everything he had written in order to free his soul from these "ghosts". I respected his wish, and when he lay ill, I burnt things of his before his eyes. What he really wanted to write was to come afterwards, only after he had gained his "liberty". Literature for him was something sacred, absolute, incorruptible, something great and pure." It sounds to me as if he just wanted to be free of his work and requesting its destruction when he was dying (and he was ill for about 7 years) was a way of letting go. But it's a difficult one to assess and respond to. Similar thing happened to Terry Pratchett (he requested that all the drafts on his hard-drive be destroyed, which they were!)
damn fine video, just stumbled on your channel and thanks for this tour, ever since I learned of Kafka, his personality, themes etc, how we was unrecognized in his lifetime, I have been fascinated. Love from Denmark.
Thanks! Really appreciate the nice comment and you stumbling on this channel. I'm exactly the same re: Kafka. I had read The Metamorphosis years ago but recently supervised a Master's student working on Kafka and that led me to read much more of his work and Nicholas Murray's biography. Sometimes people just talk about Kafka as "weird" and "unsettling" but he's much more deeper and more varied than that. One day I'd like to go back to Czechia and do a video exploring his writing of "The Castle." I might also do a video about Kafka in Oxford (where I'm based). There's a lot going on here at the moment, for the 100th anniversary, including an exhibition of his manuscripts in the Bodleian (most of his manuscripts are held in Oxford). Thanks again for visiting and commenting!
A wonderful video and although I have visited Prague you have unearthed to me a side of the city that I didn’t know about.
Thanks, David! Glad I could show you a different side to Prague... and of course there's many other sides to see! I do love it there.
It is a great video. Looking forward to seeing videos about other philosophers.
Thanks so much! My videos are about authors but there's definitely a lot of overlap with philosophy as well... Kafka is a great example of that.
Nice vlog love it
I enjoyed this video, it makes me want to take the time to get to know Kafka better. (I also would like to know what the food on the plate at 3:10 is?)
Kafka is definitely worth getting to know! Glad you liked the video. I'm afraid I can't remember what the dish I ate at Cafe Louvre was called, but it was very good.
Great exploration of Dracula's setting, Gabriel! Really enjoyed your thoughts about why Dracula even passes through Whitby instead of arriving immediately in London.
Thanks so much, Nathan! Yeah, that narrative decision mystified me for a long time. Before I read Dracula, I assumed that the whole thing was set at Whitby because so much is made of the connection (mostly by the Whitby Tourism Board). Even after I read it I remembered the Whitby section as being much larger and more important than it was, and it was only after re-reading it that I really saw how small that Whitby section is. You could imagine an editor saying, "cut Whitby so we get to the action in London faster" but I think the novel would have lost a lot in atmosphere and imagery if he had done that. It's Stoker's "Tom Bombadil." It was only by thinking about Whitby in Dracula whilst actually in Whitby that I could understand why Stoker had included it... it's too good a setting to miss out on! Another angle would be to think of Stoker as Lyceum theatre manager and the three primary settings (Transylvania, Whitby, and London) as three acts / three scene changes. Although we go back to Transylvania at the end so Stoker has more freedom in a novel than a stage play. But it may have been in his head to think, "a story needs different locations" especially considering how lavish the sets and costumes were at the Lyceum...!
Nice job dear teacher
Great job, Gabriel.
Thanks, Brian! And thanks for watching :)
Captain Morgan Rum
People of Gaza are being cleared for the gurion canal project.... PASS IT ON
Lol
Powerful stuff, but a container ship?
😮🤔🤔🤔🤔💤
David Leans' concept for showing Suez Canal was beatiful in this film and Peter O'Toole playing Lawrence Is the excellency in actuation. No one can miss this movie.
hm
Step 1. Conquer Aqaba. Step 2. Disappear into the desert for 103 years. Step 3. Fix the Suez Blockade. Truly a hero amongst all men.
Container Ship? In 1917?
Ha ha
Should have added Tom Hanks on his raft waving at the container ship! lol Great video !
Funny was found... Thanks. Well done Sir.
That was actually really creative, you made my day!
Awesome 🤣🤣🤣
Evergreen ship blocks Suez not for money, not for fight, not to drive away the Turks...it blocks it because it is it's pleasure
Bloody marvellous, sir!
Great video! Thank you so much, Christopher, and Gabriel.