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Context
AEH (old A.E. Housman) is dead, and reminiscing about his life before he enters the afterlife. The boatman Charon drops him off at a riverbank, where AEH runs into a young man that he soon realizes is himself. In this scene, AEH offers young Housman some advice on scholarship and success in his fields of textual criticism and poetry. This scene in its entirety is about 20 minutes long, but can easily be cut into shorter segments.
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Start:
AEH: What are you doing here, one may ask?
Housman: Classics, sir. I’m studying for Greats.
AEH: Are you? I did Greats, too.
[... … …]
End:
AEH: The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don’t like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical with ours.
Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love, Grove Press, 1997, pp. 30-36.
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Links
Read a review of The Invention of Love by The New Yorker, including a brief biography of A.E. Housman: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/02/19/lost-horizon
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