{"id":5080,"date":"2006-10-31T07:16:54","date_gmt":"2006-10-31T07:16:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5080"},"modified":"2006-10-31T07:16:54","modified_gmt":"2006-10-31T07:16:54","slug":"the-republic-of-conscience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5080","title":{"rendered":"the republic of conscience"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At Campus Compact&#8217;s 20th anniversary, Mary Robinson gave the keynote address. She is a distinguished lawyer, former President of Ireland, and former UN Commissioner of Human Rights. At one point, in her soft Irish accent, she read Seamus Heaney&#8217;s &#8220;The Republic of Conscience,&#8221; a poem that he has now given to Amnesty International. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.artforamnesty.org\/aoc\/inspiration.html\">Read all 39 lines<\/a>, but this is how it starts:<\/p>\n<p>When I landed in the republic of conscience<\/p>\n<p>it was so noiseless when the engines stopped<\/p>\n<p>I could hear a curlew high above the runway.<\/p>\n<p>At immigration, the clerk was an old man<\/p>\n<p>who produced a wallet from his homespun coat<\/p>\n<p>and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.<\/p>\n<p>The woman in customs asked me to declare<\/p>\n<p>the words of our traditional cures and charms<\/p>\n<p>to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.<\/p>\n<p>No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.<\/p>\n<p>You carried your own burden and very soon<\/p>\n<p>your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Campus Compact&#8217;s 20th anniversary, Mary Robinson gave the keynote address. She is a distinguished lawyer, former President of Ireland, and former UN Commissioner of Human Rights. At one point, in her soft Irish accent, she read Seamus Heaney&#8217;s &#8220;The Republic of Conscience,&#8221; a poem that he has now given to Amnesty International. Read all [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}