He's Ireland's greatest living writer and its first Nobel prize-winning poet since Yeats. As "Famous" Seamus Heaney turns 70, he talks to Robert McCrum about celebrity, surviving a stroke and drinking poteen with Ted Hughes
Robert McCrum
Sun 19 Jul 2009 00.01 BST
Seamus Heaney, photographed in Dublin, 2009. Photograph: Antonio Olmos
Seamus Heaney is taking a taxi from his home in Sandymount, which overlooks the bright grey waters of Dublin Bay, to the centre of town. Our driver is silent, but bursting with respect. When the poet compliments him on the ingenuity of his route through the lunchtime traffic, the cabbie exclaims, with a sudden loss of discretion, "Only the best now for Ireland's favourite son."
Everyone wants a piece of Ireland's first Nobel-winning poet since Yeats. When we arrive at our destination, an oyster bar overlooking St Stephen's Green, the ebb and flow of Irish pride in Seamus, as he is universally known, surges up in a succession of spontaneous greetings. Everyone recognises Heaney's professorial spectacles and silvery mop.
A frisson passes through the restaurant. This woman wants to tell him about her daughter, recovering from leukaemia, and to ask for an autograph. Two punters, checking the starting prices on a laptop, volunteer a tip about the 2.30 at Leopardstown. Another old chap wants to be remembered. And the maître d' is beside himself with getting the best table ready.
I wonder how Heaney can stand it.
No need to worry. The object of this attention seems to move in a serene bubble of modesty and unconcern: he likes the attention, and it does not really trouble him. He's had it, in different ways, all his life, and he knows that, for an Irish poet, it comes with the territory.There are many ways to be a famous writer in Dublin. You can be mad and grand, like Yeats; or mysterious, like Beckett; or drunk, like Flann O'Brien; or absent, like Joyce; or what? A long time ago, Clive James nailed Heaney with "Seamus Famous", but that's a gag, at best half true, spun off Heaney's brilliant self-presentation. There is rather more to the poet than his fame, dazzling though that can be.
For someone who has been so remorselessly scrutinised, Heaney is still something of an enigma. He works hard to make "famous" seem normal. Unfailingly courteous and attentive, he can also be grave, remote and occasionally stern, always watching himself, like the king of a vulnerable monarchy.
In keeping with that vigilance, and a well-defended uncertainty, Heaney is always asking himself the essential questions articulated in Preoccupations, his collected essays. "How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?"I've known Seamus Heaney for about half of his writing life. The key to our friendship was always a third party: the mischievous, antic figure of the folk-singer, broadcaster and lord of misrule, David Hammond, from Belfast. Last summer, after a long illness, Hammond died. I was in America at the time, and unable to go to the funeral.
As part of my farewell to "Davey", I knew I had to see Seamus, pay my respects to the dead, and share the recollection of old times. Quite apart from my deep affection for Hammond, I'm conscious that Heaney is keen on the proper obsequies (he loves funerals) and will be only too glad to raise a glass to our old friend.
It's a good moment. Heaney has just turned 70. On the table in the window of his attic study - the place that he calls his "hutch" - there are three piles of poetry books: he wants to pass on good first editions of his life's work to his children. As well as copies of the best-known volumes (Death of a Naturalist, North, Field Work, Door into the Dark and Station Island) there are the translations (Sweeney Astray, Beowulf), the plays (The Cure at Troy, The Burial at Thebes), and some very rare editions from small presses, an accumulated bibliography of between 30 and 40 titles.
With three score years and ten behind him, Heaney is in a quasi-mystical mood, ready to take stock of his life and to address the question of growing old as a poet. "The problem as you get older," he says, "is that you become more self-aware. At the same time you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky. You're either obsessed or you're surprised. There's no halfway house."
Lately, his age has given him both an extra reason to take stock and also a premonitory surprise, a sudden tap on the shoulder. In August 2006, Heaney had a stroke, something he's not spoken about publicly before.
Heaney and his wife, Marie, were up in Donegal for the 75th birthday of Ann Friel, wife of Brian, the playwright. "We flew up there," says Heaney, taking up the story. "There were many old friends. We all stayed in a boarding house, and went to bed at around 12.30." In the past, Donegal has been the scene of certain bardic revels, but on this occasion, he says, "it wasn't a wild night. David Hammond was there, Brian Friel himself. John Hume. Tom Kilroy [the writer], Desmond Kavanagh. I went to bed around one o'clock, and woke at eight the next morning. We were in a twin-bedded room, and I spoke across the gap between us to Marie, reporting a remark made to me the night before by Brian Friel about another distinguished Irish writer. You know, in the middle of the floor, he'd said to me, 'X is a real shit, you know.'"
Heaney goes on, "So we had a good laugh about this, and then I made a move to get out of bed, and I felt strange. I didn't know what was wrong with me. I made to move, but I couldn't move, and I felt very odd. My speech wasn't affected. When Marie came over to help me, she saw my leg was twisted, and she began to cry out. And I said, 'For God's sake, calm down.' Yes, I spoke roughly to my little girl, and then I realised there was something seriously wrong, so I apologised to her and said. 'Yes, you'd better go to the Kavanaghs.'"This was a piece of luck. Mary and Desmond Kavanagh and their children are medics.
"So immediately the family went into action," Heaney continues. "The medical grapevine across the country was alerted and the ambulance was on its way. [The poet] Peter Fallon and Kavanagh carried me down the stairs."
Heaney reports his instinctive Ulster sang froid, saying: "My sense of humour was intact as they were carrying me down." Almost everyone involved in getting the bulky, 6ft figure of Heaney down the stairs had been involved with the Field Day theatre company, and many of the group had recently suffered minor illnesses. So now, with his natural detachment, Heaney made a joke. "It's the curse of Field Day, I said. But within an hour I was in the ambulance."
"The trip in the ambulance I always remember," he says, "because Marie was in the back with me. I just wrote about it three weeks ago. To me, that was one of the actual beauties of the stroke, that renewal of love in the ambulance. One of the strongest, sweetest memories I have. We went through Glendorn on a very beautiful, long, bumpy ride to Letterkenny hospital." There, they did a scan, he continues. "And the woman who was doing the scan - this is Ireland for you - the nurse said, 'I believe you were at Friel's last night.' Her uncle had been at the party. So this is Ireland," he repeats, with satisfaction. It's certainly Heaney's Ireland.
Heaney's stroke - the festive occasion; the circle of old friends; the jokes; the Irish grapevine; the observation of the self from afar; the country drive - is all of a piece with the poet's character, good fortune and his unflappable temperament. Within a comparatively short time, a matter of weeks, he was on the road to recovery. Looking back, he can even refer to his hospitalisation as "a rest cure".
But I've had my own experience of stroke. It is much bleaker than that. So I pressed him about the darker side of his experience. "Yes, I cried," he says. "I cried, and I wanted my Daddy, funnily enough. I did. I felt babyish." But the public Heaney cannot enjoy the luxury of self-indulgence. Even by his standards, the next stage of his convalescence was surreal, a visit from a friend, the former president of the United States.
"Clinton was here for the Ryder Cup," he says. "He'd been up with the Taoiseach [Bertie Ahern] and had heard about my 'episode'. The next thing, he put a call to the hospital, and said he was on his way. He strode into the ward like a kind of god. My fellow sufferers, four or five men much more stricken than I was, were amazed. But he shook their hands and introduced himself. It was marvellous, really. He went round all the wards and gave the whole hospital a terrific boost. We had about 25 minutes with him, and talked about Ulysses Grant's memoirs, which he was reading." Then Clinton was off, back to the airport.Around this time, perhaps responding to the larger stage on which he always finds himself, he began to write a poem, Miracle, inspired by the gospel story of the paralysed man lowered through the roof into Christ's presence. Heaney insists that it's not a spiritual poem, but one that marked "being changed a bit by something happening. Every now and again you write a poem that changes gear."
He had never written a poem in response to scripture before, and says he is not a believer. But clearly the stroke had come as a powerful moment of punctuation in his intensely busy life, and gave him the idea that he should devote more time to himself. "I looked at the calendar after these days in the hospital," he says. "I thought, 'My God, you've never stopped, Seamus.' So, for a year afterwards, I just cancelled everything. I decided that in hospital."
So now there was another pressure, a new conflict to wrestle with. "I spend a lot of time saying 'No' to people," he says, "and then being anxious about saying No." He says his illness has heightened an inner sense of private doubt, confiding, "I'm less confident about public speaking. I spend a lot of time worrying about it, and getting it ready. I'm not good spontaneously at all. I suppose it's balancing a sense of obligation against self-preservation."
Meanwhile, in hospital, making a steady recovery, he read more than he had in ages, finding a special comfort in thrillers by Henning Mankell, Donna Leon and Robert Harris. With time on his hands, inevitably he also reviewed his situation. His mother had died of a stroke at 74, never regaining consciousness; his father from colon cancer at 76.
Did he, from his hospital bed, have any regrets about succumbing to the pressures of celebrity? "I can't regret myself," he replies. "I mean, it's part of me, for better or worse. I'm aware now that I've repeated myself, but it's my temperament. I'm stuck with it."
Seamus Heaney was born in 1939, just before the Second World War, on the farm of Mossbawn, near the village of Castledawson, County Derry, into an Ulster farming family. In one of his poems, he recalls a strangely tranquil haven from the storms raging across the west - the thump of a sledgehammer, and the "heavyweight silence" of cattle in the rain.
Mossbawn is equidistant from Derry and Belfast, in deep country, a one-storey thatched and whitewashed house set back from a main road, though the traffic was always intermittent. Heaney says that the dominant notes in Mossbawn were the clucks and cackles of the hens, and sometimes the roar of a calf or cow from a nearby field. He also remembers the screams of the pigs from the slaughterhouse across the way.
His mother, who was a McCann, gave him the convivial side of his character. "The Heaneys were more kind of native American," he jokes. "They were always in the wigwam, facing each other, and very grave. There was a kind of stoicism about the Heaneys and an Anglo-Saxon melancholy, and everything was very measured. Marie once said of them that they didn't carry a spare ounce of emotional weight. That was completely true."To be crude about it, his McCann side nurtures his public face, while the Heaney part fuels the graver and more introspective reflections of the poetry. His wife Marie also tells me that Mossbawn holds the key to her husband. "It's his paradise," she says. "His Eden. All he's ever wanted to do is go back."
Both the McCanns and the Heaneys were Roman Catholic families in Protestant Ulster. This has placed him at the murderous crossroads of sectarian conflict and Irish nationalism throughout his life. It's an unenviable and dangerous location at the best of times, and there's a part of him that's highly attuned to the history and heritage of oppression. He has always moved, as he puts it, "like a double agent among the big concepts". On both sides of the border, some still question his loyalties.
"My mother's side," he goes on, speaking carefully, "were much more alert to the exacerbations of the situation, and with a stronger sense of injustice, and a more articulate mockery. The irony is so important. In the north, northern irony has allowed people to stand at the edge of the rift and shout across to each other. This is very important, actually. David Hammond used to say, 'Banter, banter is the curse of us all.'"
Life in Mossbawn, in the Ulster countryside, is what gives Heaney his language and imagery - words like "braird", "seggans" and "sned", titles like A Hagging Match, The Haw Lantern, and Broagh, a placename almost impossible for an outsider to pronounce correctly. I remember asking him about the nuances of Ulster English for a television programme some years back. Heaney's reply expressed not only a deep reverence for the sanctity of his country paradise, but also articulated the source of his creative energy. He remains, pre-eminently, the poet of the peat bog and the home fire. He said: "Your language has a lot to do with your confidence, your sense of place and authority." He added that speaking his own language, Irish English, was to acquire a trust in the pronunciation and in the quirks of vocabulary, and "to go through a kind of political re-awakening".
Heaney's poetry has a distinctive poetic language that comes from a direct and intimate connection with the Irish landscape and its culture rather than any academic literary ambition. He has often said that he showed no special aptitude or poetic promise as a child.
A poem like Alphabets recalls a small boy wondering over the alphabet, but showing no precocious mastery - "First it is 'copying out', and then 'English'" - until, as he puts it, "the poet's dream stole over him like sunlight." If there was poetry in Mossbawn, it came through holiday, festival and party recitations.
Then, in 1953, this paradise was shattered when his brother Christopher was killed in a road accident, aged three. In the elegiac poem Mid-Term Break, Heaney wrote about this dreadful episode in his young, adolescent life (he was 13). He describes being "embarrassed by old men standing up to shake my hand", and then, with the poet's detachment, seeing his baby brother's corpse laid out in an upstairs room with "a poppy bruise on his left temple". Even by the stoical traditions of the North, Heaney learned early to ingest his pain.Young Seamus was the scholarship boy in a family of seven boys and two girls. As the clever, eldest one, he was bound for the city - the great Protestant industrial and shipbuilding inferno of Belfast. As a country boy, banished from Eden, he was lost. His first poems were written under the pseudonym "Incertus". He has described the personality of this pseudonymous poet as expert in obeisance, "a shy soul fretting. Oh yes, I crept before I walked."
"I was describing my own unsureness," Heaney explains, when I ask him about the Incertus pseudonym. "Describing exactly the inner state of the creature. When I was an undergraduate [at Queen's, Belfast], I was in the poetry-aspiring business, and I didn't feel confident. I didn't feel I had crossed any line. I was still scrabbling on the outside, not entering."
Heaney, who often harks back to the Anglo-Saxons, has many of their qualities. Behind his homespun bareness there's a highly wrought editorial process at work, and a good deal of artifice in which things are not quite as they seem. It's this that can sustain an accusation of deviousness and even cunning. In his own career, "Incertus" was soon replaced by "Seamus J. Heaney". This was the young man from Castledawson who, at the turn of the Sixties, began to experiment with poetry.
In the autumn of 1962, Heaney met young Marie Devlin, his future wife. "We met at a dinner. That evening I walked her home, and I lent her a book, saying I needed it back by Thursday. The disgraceful truth was that I had a girlfriend, and she was returning on Friday." It's a long time ago, but he is still rather sheepish about the memory. "So we met on Thursday, and then there was a kind of stealth. It took a long time to clear the decks. But there was a kind of immediate recognition, yes."
As well as falling in love, he began to write poems with "a new sense of possibility, and a new confidence". He protests that "they weren't any good," but remembers "I was excited." He had joined Philip Hobsbaum's influential Belfast poetry circle, a group, he once said, "who used to talk poetry day after day with an intensity and prejudice that cannot but have left a mark on all of us". It was within this circle that he first wrote poems such as Digging, Tollund Man, Mid-Term Break and Death of a Naturalist.
With an exhilarating sense of discovery and excitement, these early poems were published by Karl Miller in the New Statesman. Then Faber showed interest; everything was happening very fast. "I knew I wasn't quite ready," Heaney says, "but I wrote like hell and sent the manuscript in." That was January 1965. When he describes it now, it seems to him as if it was yesterday. "To be truthful, it wasn't until North was written, and had come out, that I felt I had followed a calling or done something in the name of it."
Death of a Naturalist was noted for poetry that sprang from the farming life of Heaney's youth, and its subtle communication of a physical and pastoral intensity in a language of profound and unforced simplicity. Heaney, whose work appeared at the same time as Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson found himself hailed as a standard-bearer for a "Northern Renaissance", a movement centred on Belfast that some have dismissed as a journalistic construction but which, nonetheless, signalled an end to the poetically barren 1940s and 50s.
Edna O'Brien, who has followed Heaney's career from the beginning, "devouring everything he wrote", believes that, once he had emerged from the cocoon of literary Belfast, "his place in Irish literature was guaranteed, secure, and goldplated." "There's a poem in his collection District and Circle [called] The Lift, that is truly great," she says. "His essays, too, are so marvellously luminous, so erudite and accessible." Invited to compare him to Yeats, she demurs blithely. "I'm not going to go down that road," she laughs. "Great writers are unique, and beyond comparisons." From the beginning, then, Heaney always seemed destined for greater things.
Despite his precocious flying start, Heaney says he was still "uncertain at that stage what I was doing". He took a postgraduate year of teacher training, not realising it was a blind alley: "I thought I was going to be a teacher," he says. "The first guy out of the family, and into the trade with a degree."
At this early stage, and throughout his career, Heaney has been susceptible to the influence of stronger artistic talents. Now he met a poet, later a great and enduring friend, who "actually sent a charge of energy through me, a kind of electric Hopkinsian transmission". He had met Ted Hughes.
"I always felt safer for Ted's friendship somehow," he says now, recalling the poet laureate. "He was foundational to me. As you know, he transmitted a desire to be more yourself to yourself." Of their first meeting, he says, almost bride-like, "I recall trembling with excitement and shyness."
The next time they were together, for a reading, Hughes came over with his partner Assia Wevill. "We sat up in my house in Belfast that night after the reading, drinking poteen and singing. Marie sang songs. I think Assia sang some Israeli songs, and Ted sang 'The Brown and Yellow Ale', which he said was [James] Joyce's favourite song. Everybody was young. Assia was quite magnificently beautiful. She said a wonderfully grand and affected thing to me. She could see I was excited and in awe of Ted, and she said 'Poets ought to be like bishops. Each should have his own diocese and meet not all that often, and quite formally.'
I remember Marie had a strong sense that Assia was somehow halted by Sylvia [Plath], and in competition with her."
Now that we're talking about Ted Hughes, a poet who was always so attuned to an unpoliced unconscious, and even the astrological side of creativity, it seems like the right moment to ask about the question of inspiration. Where does poetry come from? In his response to this question, Heaney is probably more pragmatic and Anglo-Saxon than Hughes would have been.
"I think it comes from all the other poetry that's there," he replies. "I think that a relationship with something else is called for - all the other poetry that's around, or the culture, or the times, or your clique - and it calls the poetry out of you." Is there someone who does this? "To get started, what starts you?" he wonders. "You can call it the muse, but it's excitement, the beloved. Certainly, there's a kind of quickening." He begins to describe this excitement. "There is a physical need. I need to feel a purchase on something. I used to say that it was like a bite on the line, or a tug. With me, the purchase is a 'thingyness' or a 'memoryness'". Now he's becoming slightly Delphic, and I sense we're drifting into some ancient Celtic cave.
"It really comes out of - from the side... Like a ball kicked in," he goes on, speaking of this private moment with a tangible, strange reticence. "It's rather risky. I don't keep a notebook. I'm superstitious. I always felt that if I started to be assiduous about it, and looked for it, then it might go away. Or I would turn into a different kind of writer."
So is Marie his muse? "Well, she was a muse, certainly," he replies. I'm not exactly sure what to make of this answer, but before we can go down that avenue, he's switched back to Hughes. "Ted's phrase, which I love quoting, is that the only thing that distinguishes what we call poetry from the other literary arts was that it arrived from 'the place of ultimate suffering and decision' in us." He repeats the phrase with relish and satisfaction, as if it defines something important about his own work.
For Heaney, the Irish Catholic from the North, the central and inescapable fact about his creative life, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to the present day, is that it had been shadowed, haunted, and occasionally blighted, by the Troubles. If ever there was a place of "ultimate suffering" in Heaney, it must be located somewhere in the historical and psychic trauma of Northern Ireland.
But when you read Heaney's poems, you rarely find any committed parallel narrative. It's as though, from very early on, out of temperament as much as self-preservation, double-agent Heaney chose to step back from, or to the side of, the crisis. To be detached, and uninvolved. To elevate his uncertainty into art, and transmute it into the lyricism of everyday life and the "thingyness" of things. How he executed this manoeuvre is not exactly clear, but there's a story he tells against himself that says a lot about his innate diplomatic skills in navigating the bloody waters of the sectarian North.
When he lived in Belfast during the beginning of the Troubles, Heaney used to buy fish and chips at a shop on the edge of fiercely loyalist territory. One night in the chippy a new assistant, not knowing Heaney as a regular, recognised him from a television arts show the night before. "Oh," she cried, lashing on the salt and vinegar. "I saw you on the box last night, didn't I? Aren't you the Irish poet?"
Before Heaney could answer this, the most loaded of all local questions, the owner of the shop turned from her frying to correct the girl. "Not at all, dear," she said. "He's like the rest of us, a British subject living in Ulster. God," she went on, now speaking directly to Heaney, "wouldn't it sicken you? Having to listen to that? Irish poet!" When he repeats this story, Heaney confesses he was afraid to contradict her. Aren't you the Irish poet? The irony is that, having used all his resources to evade the question, Heaney is now, more than ever, defined in this way.
At this point, Marie Heaney, climbing up the stairs to the poet's "hutch", arrives with cups of coffee. She is recovering from a successful cancer treatment, and wears a wig. Today, she has lost her voice. There's a whispered conversation in which Heaney wonders if it's not too early for "a nip" (of Bushmills), and then we continue.
At first, he says he had been carried along on "a generational conveyor belt". He'd been the "scholarship boy, chosen boy, first class degree. I'd gone into teaching, and had blessedly encountered poetry, the magic of print. I'd been published, and it all just came along. It happened very fast, and I knew that I was being overpraised in my first three books. I wasn't as sure as other people were."
Then, in 1970, he was invited to Berkeley, California, and his eyes were opened. "This gave me a sense that I could make a choice. I wasn't just on the conveyor belt. I could step off it. When we came back from Berkeley in 1971, I was ready to make the move and become a writer, as it were. America influenced me in taking the step to leave Queen's and go freelance."
He doesn't see this as leaving Belfast because of the Troubles, as some have alleged. "I said, I have to verify myself to myself. I would give up the job [at Queen's University]. Among other things, I felt I was drinking too much. The relationship between the move to County Wicklow and the happenings in the North wasn't cause and effect at all, no."
Heaney insists that the cause of his move was what he calls "the writerly desire. It was the right thing at the right tine. But, of course, once I moved there was the sense of historical change, and an editorial in the Irish Times, 'Heaney moves South'. So this was already mythologised, and I couldn't escape the sense that it was a public act as well as a private."
Just before I met Heaney, I had come across a quotation from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which seemed appropriate. Now I read it out to him for his reaction: "A man lives not only his personal life as an individual but also consciously or unconsciously the life of his epoch and his contemporaries."
Heaney listens thoughtfully, and after a pause, he agrees. "That's true," he says. "You didn't need to be a writer to be living the same life [of the Troubles]. That's what gave everybody who came to the fore in my generation a charge." Temperamentally, he cannot be unambiguous about his answer, and launches into a complicated and not wholly convincing theory about how the poetry of Belfast in the 60s was not related to the violence. But then, having given the diplomatic answer, he concedes that the Troubles had given him "something of consequence" to write about, and that "Something was at stake. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but I'm aware of it since the peace process."
"These were very dangerous times," says Heaney, yielding a point with hindsight. "When the Provisional IRA began their campaign, people like myself, with a strong sense that things needed to be redressed, were excited." Bloody Sunday and its poisoned aftermath polarised everything. Even Heaney lost his cool sufficiently to write a polemical poem, speaking of "My heart besieged by anger, my mind a gap of danger" and of justice waiting to sprout "in Derry where the 13 men lay dead". Looking back to those dark days, he insists that this was a protest poem, commissioned for a rally but never actually performed.
The worst year was 1974. "There was a sense of an utterly wasteful, cancerous stalemate, and that the violence was unproductive. It was villainous, but you were living with it. Only after it stopped did you realise what you had lived with. Day by day, week by week, we lived through this, and didn't fully take in what was going on."
But he always felt it was impossible to take sides, and I ask him if he has ever regretted not being more vocal. "Speaking out," he insists, "one was cornered. My sympathy was not with the IRA, but it wasn't with the Thatcher government, either." He says now that he "didn't want to enter into bigotry," but his deep Irishness was never far below the surface. Again, there's a little episode in his creative life that's more revealing than any commentary.
When, in 1981, Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison placed Heaney in an anthology of contemporary British poetry, he was indignant at being "cornered" and protested in rhyme. "My passport's green", he wrote, "No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast the Queen".
He now says of this furore that "it was complicated because at the same time I didn't want to pull my books out of Britain. I didn't want to be bigoted. I just wanted clarification, but it was complicated... It was a hell of an uneasy time here, savage. It was an awkward time for anybody who wanted to stand apart from both sides. I didn't want to be too rabid, or enlisted as an IRA spokesperson either.'
He goes on, "As I was living in the Republic, I wanted to call myself Irish. I just felt totally conflicted. I felt I wasn't owning up to something in myself if I ran with that ["contemporary British poetry"]. It's a very ambiguous, uneasy thing, having the British cake and eating it, as it were." Lately, Heaney has become more political, for instance, urging Irish voters to say Yes to the Lisbon Treaty, but the Troubles remain a closed book.
Heaney turned 50 during the murderous final decade of the war in the North. To mark this milestone, he gave himself a year off in County Wicklow, and went to Rome for the first time. Does he go to church? "No. I mean, I go into it. I go to funerals and weddings." He doesn't pray, but "I find myself mantra-ing a bit. I'm not addressing a godhead, but repeating a mantra. But it's like nursery rhymes and belongs in the realms of things known by heart."
During this season of solitary communion with his Irishness, to occupy himself as a fulltime writer, Heaney began some translations from Irish Gaelic literature. He had learned Irish at school. The language was real to him. "If you lived in the Irish countryside as I did in my childhood," he says, "you lived in a primal Gaeltacht." So he translated the Madness of King Sweeney, a classic Irish text. Other commissions followed, notably for Beowulf, a translation which, to his amazement, was awarded the Whitbread prize in 1999. This was part of a prize-winning sequence he shared with his friend and collaborator, Ted Hughes. Several times in our conversation Heaney referred to "Ted" with a deep sense of personal loss.
Hughes died in 1998, three years after Heaney's Nobel Prize. The poet's death was like a great tree falling in the forest; the prize a sudden gale of public exposure: these two events, so unconnected, have combined to leave Heaney isolated, reflective, and facing up to the inevitability of the endgame. A poet who has conducted his life so successfully wants to manage his last years with grace and distinction, and to continue defying expectations.
"Between the stroke and the 70th birthday," he says, "I suddenly realised I had boxed myself into a kind of closing cadence." So now he's doing his best to break out of that box, and says "I'm trying to finish a book of poems to counteract that." He wants to call it Human Chain, another reference to his downstairs exit to the ambulance after the stroke.
There'll be no Yeatsian madness for Seamus Famous. In fact, he takes secret inspiration from one of literature's classic enigmas, confiding that when recently asked by an arts programme which character from fiction he'd like to be, "I said I'd like to be Jeeves."
He is still elucidating the mystery of his life as a poet. "If the truth be told," he says, "it's only now, 14 years later, that I'm realising that I really did win the Nobel Prize. All that time,
I was holding it at bay and diving underneath it, and hurrying through it."
Heaney has reached a moment in his life where he wants to be at peace with himself, and with his society. He quotes, as a kind of epitaph, the messenger's line from his translation of "Oedipus at Colonus": "Wherever that man went, he went gratefully." Here, he catches his own quotation, and laughs. "I'd better watch out that I don't talk myself into a conclusion."
Nothing's easy, but he can find renewal and take comfort in the solitude of his house in Wicklow. He says he still finds it hard to say "No". "I'm haunted by 'ought'," he confesses, conceding that he's probably done too many interviews (including a whole volume of them, Stepping Stones, with Dennis O'Driscoll), and accepted too many honorary degrees. "Again, after the stroke I thought, 'This has got to stop now.'"
Now, more than a decade after the peace process was signed, the lethal, divisive times through which he worked in his prime are part of the Irish past that is always so vivid and present in the everyday lives of the people. "British" and "Irish" have become written into the constitutional settlement inaugurated by the Good Friday Agreement.
The sectarian scars are healing, despite the occasional flaring of violence. Now, says Heaney, "You can have an Irish identity in the North, and also have your Irish passport. As far as I'm concerned, the language has changed, the times have changed, and we have signed up to an open relationship with Sinn Fein." He seems relieved that the ancient Irish blood feud is in abeyance for the moment.
Heaney says he was not involved in the Good Friday Agreement "in any way". But he's known John Hume, its chief architect, for years, and when President Clinton threw himself into the peace process, he recruited Heaney's work to his cause, quoting one of Heaney's most memorable lines "Between hope and history" at every opportunity. The loaded tranquillity of the peace process mirrors the pregnant understatements of Heaney's own poetry.
He will never be drawn into an explicit exploration of his place in this history, or his contribution of "hope", but in answer to his own inner and urgent questions, Heaney knows that poetry must be a private matter. So how does he reconcile the pressures of the Nobel laureateship, and prevent the wind of celebrity from extinguishing the flame of inspiration? "Well," he admits, slightly baffled, "I don't know the answer to that."
The taxi is waiting downstairs. It's time to go into town.
• This article was amended on Tuesday 1 December 2009 because the article referred to Assia Wevill as Ted Hughes's wife but they were not married.
Posting poetry on Instagram was, from the beginning, a little subversion. On a platform driven by images, writers started to promote their words and many poets have gone on to create huge communities and interactive audiences. So what is it about instapoetry that we all love so much?
WHO WRITES
Instagram poets started to be impossible to ignore. Rupi Kaur is one of the most successful instapoets and, for her, Instagram was a vital way to expose her work. With three books launched, she has already sold millions of copies in different countries. Undoubtedly this would not be possible without a platform to expose her writing.
"If it were not for the internet, and the age of social media, I, a Punjabi Sikh woman writing about themes that were impacting her and those around her would have never been published in a traditional Western space. Especially on a continent where the experiences of women of colour are easily derided and rarely offered publishing deals."
Nikita Gill, who is also from an Indian family like Kaur, started writing at a very young age. But it was because of Instagram that she found an audience. For her, instapoetry is not a genre. It's just a medium.
"Ultimately, the medium does not matter as much as the words do. Being a creative person is like being constantly on a treasure hunt inside your own head for ideas, the way you are going to explore them and express them."
Along with them, the Spanish writer Leticia Sala found her internet fame. With 92.8k of followers, she posts poetry in English and Spanish. And she disagrees with the criticizing treatment instapoetry receives.
"It is a shame that Insta-poets are so heavily criticized today. It seems to me that it is the literary world that is most strongly opposed to this ‘novel’ approach, but I believe that the poetry that comes from social media platforms is the purest out there. It hasn’t been edited, or corrected by anyone; it is raw and honest."
It is also inevitable to think that many of those writers are women or from other minorities. The Internet was capable of giving space for those voices. Due to that, maybe this is one of the reasons why we love instapoetry.
Identification is always a key point for a reader. And hundreds of those readers never saw themselves represented the way they see now.
WHY DO WE LOVE INSTAPOETRY
It is probably impossible to summarize this question. However, maybe some factors can help to understand why we love instapoetry.
1 -identification. Again. People liked to read and continued to read because they saw themselves in those words. They saw their heartbreaks, their passions, their struggles. They saw reality.
2 - accessibility. The poems were accessible anytime and anywhere for readers. Maybe many of them didn't have the money to buy books. This can be their opportunity to engage and be involved with reading. The format is also accessible, as it is quick to read.
3 - vulnerability. Instagram poets are not afraid to expose their struggles. The problems they show are also the problems of their generation. The poems are not about a journey on a ship. They are about the date that was bad or low self-esteem. Situations that many of their readers got through.
“I’m not going to read Walt Whitman. That’s not accessible to me emotionally, but I think right now is a moment where I think maybe we, as the younger generation, are deciding what poetry we like. And I think Instagram has become sort of the mining field for it” Aly Dixon
Loving instapoetry will not kill traditional poetry. But will open new doors and connections.
THERE IS SPACE FOR A NEW PHENOMENON?
Overall, it is hard to say the path the market is going to take. Everything is still changing fast when we think about the internet. While it can be harder or different to find success today, it is still possible.
The truth is: the road is here to be pavement. The public is learning to know more about what they want. As a result, this will lead to discoveries and more space for emerging writers.
So don't be afraid to put your work out there. Someone at someplace will identify with you.
Even if there's no right answer for why we love instapoetry, we know that we love what comes from the heart.
About Inês Alves
Inês Alves is a Brazilian communication student and writer, trying to navigate the world. Has a passion for books and reality shows, so it's always talking about one of those subjects. Believes that writing can help to build a revolution in society and wants to be part of it. Find her on Instagram at @inesilvalvess.
An Interview With Poet and Fiction Writer Grace Paley
by Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler
DIRECT QUOTE
3.17.08
Celebrated short story writer and poet Grace Paley died of cancer last August at the age of eighty-four. A lifelong activist, pacifist, and an early figure in the women’s rights movement in the 1960s, Paley was one of those writers who managed to combine a public life of frequent readings and appearances in support of a range of causes with work lauded for its artistic integrity. A familiar figure at writers conferences and rallies against, over the years, the war in Vietnam, nuclear proliferation, apartheid in South Africa, and the Iraq War, she was tireless in her efforts to bring injustice to light. As one of the first American writers to explore the lives of ordinary women in her work, she broke ground and served as a role model for women writers who came of age in the ‘60s and ’70s. In her writing and activism, she achieved something rare, a life in which the public persona and the private person were one.
Grace Paley was born in the Bronx on December 11, 1922, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Though she began her writing life as poet, she found the voice for which she would be known when she started writing fiction in her thirties, drawing heavily on her childhood in the Bronx and her experiences in her neighborhood in Greenwich Village. She published three volumes of short stories that established her as a master of the form: The Little Disturbances of Man (Doubleday, 1959); Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974); and Later the Same Day (FSG, 1985). In 1994, FSG published her Collected Stories, which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She is also the author of a collection of essays, Just As I Thought (FSG, 1998) and a number of volumes of poetry, including Leaning Forward (Granite Press, 1985) and New and Collected Poems (Tillbury Press, 1991). This month, FSG will publish her final poetry collection, Fidelity, which she completed just before her death. Paley lived in Manhattan and Thetford Hill, Vermont. She taught at Sarah Lawrence College and the City College of New York. From 1986 to 1988, she was New York’s first State Author and from 2003 to 2007 served as the Poet Laureate of Vermont.
We interviewed Paley a little more than a year before her death at her home in Thetford. Arriving at the appointed time, we got no answer when we knocked on the door. We drove back down the steep dirt road to town and found her husband, Bob, in the yard of his son’s house. He asked if we had tried the door. It was unlocked, and Grace was there, taking a nap. “Go inside and wake her up,” he told us. We drove back up the hill and walked into the house and woke her up. She had been sick then for a year with the breast cancer that would take her life, but she entertained our questions with her characteristic wry humor and quick wit. In the last year of her life, Paley continued to give readings and to make public appearances when she could. She remained a vital presence and an inspiration.
Poets & Writers Magazine: You have spent much of your life protesting against war. How does it feel to be protesting again, with the war in Iraq?
GP: I never expected I would really change the world. I do a lot less protesting now because I’m not that well. But I can put it this way: I think the world is worse, but the people are better. I think this has to do with the revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s and the work we all did in that period. The important thing to remember about the Iraq war is that the whole world protested against it. For the first time in history, the whole world, not just me and my husband Bob, but the whole world came together to try to stop a war before it started. That had never happened before. I have a book with pictures of those protests from all over the world, from Africa, from Asia, from all over Europe. In every country people said, “No, no, don’t do it, don’t do it.” Whatever happens now, this fact is in the world. I think with those protests, we made maybe a couple of inches of progress. Some light flared there for a minute and that minute may be carried on. That’s why I say the world right now is a little worse, mostly because of what our country is doing, but the people are better because almost everywhere in the world there are people who are really thinking that they have some responsibility to make a peaceful world and to live decently. We’ll see what the next generation can do. P&W: You have often said that you’re an optimistic person. How do you feel about social action? Are you still optimistic about the possibilities for creating social change?
GP: I’m optimistic because of that one moment when the whole world came out against the war. That has made me optimistic, but apart from that, I have a lot of anxiety about the state of the world. When you think of the things that have happened in Rwanda and Darfur, that are still happening in Darfur, it’s very discouraging. The degree of just plain murder is incredible. What’s happening in Iraq, where they’re all killing each other, is just terrifying. I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic; I’m just on my knees hoping that things change somehow.
P&W: Do you think it’s important for writers to be socially active?
GP: Writers? I advocate plumbers should also do something, everybody should do something. When the Iraq war started, Sam Hamill from Copper Canyon Press got all these poets together. Before anybody said a word, he had ten thousand poets writing letters to the White House saying, “Don’t go into Iraq, don’t go in.” The writers were on top of it. I have no complaint about the writers. During the Vietnam War we had something called Angry Arts, which Bob and several other artists organized. For a whole week all the artists performing in concerts at Town Hall and Lincoln Center stopped and got up and turned their backs. Everybody was quiet for several minutes to make the statement we are against this war. Artists were making murals all over the city, and the poets were in trucks driving around reading poems. The artists were present. But everybody should be involved, not just the artists. Carpenters, teachers, everybody.
P&W: In one of your essays, you tell the story of when you went to Hanoi in 1969, and one of the young Vietnamese in the group was upset to hear the Americans criticize their country. He said, “Don’t you love your country? What about Jefferson and Emerson and Whitman?” What is it like for you to have difficulty loving your country and how have you handled this over the years?
GP: First of all, it was this dopey guy in our group of Americans who made these remarks. I can still see him saying, “Oh, you wouldn’t like to come to my country, it’s racist, you know.” And I thought I’d die. I wasn’t about to get up and say my country is not racist, but I thought, “You idiot.” Then this young fellow, this young Vietnamese man, comes and says, “Are you crazy, how can you talk about your country like that?” And then we did talk more about it. Well, I’m an American. I don’t feel national pride or anything like that, but on the other hand I’m very interested in this country. I’m very interested in the history of it, and I feel that it does have some valuable ideas that really have transformed many people. Certainly this is true when I think of my own parents coming here and all the other immigrants who have come here. They came for a reason, and they were satisfied, one way or the other.
My mother says she still remembers standing at the boat in 1905. The pogroms in Russia were terrible in 1904 and 1905. They started in the 1890s and they were terrible. The Jewish Forward had a piece about this a couple of years ago, looking back to 1905. They quoted from the accounts back in 1905 saying, “In the towns and in the villages, the slaughter has been immense.” So my parents came to this country. My father went to school immediately and learned Italian and English and became a doctor, and late in life became a painter, when he retired from being a doctor. My son said, “My grandfather is an artist retired from a doctor.” They did well. Not all immigrants have done equally well, but if you talk to Italians or Irish or Serbo-Croatians, the country welcomed them. Now we are unwelcoming to immigrants because they are a poor and undereducated class. The bad thing is these old time immigrants are not standing up enough for the newer immigrants—the Latino people who have been coming across the Mexican border and others. There are many different cultures in this country, which makes it a very interesting country.
P&W: In your book of collected writings, Just As I Thought, you describe your parents as “atheist, socialist Jews.” How much did their views influence yours?
GP: Yes, that is who my parents were, but I used to take my grandmother to shul. She was not an atheist, though she was not very religious. But the way my parents lived just seemed the normal way to live. I grew up in the Bronx. My memories are from the Depression, the late 1930s. The people on my street didn’t work then. The men had no work, but my father was the neighborhood doctor. So I was a rich person relative to all my friends. I had a very happy childhood because the streets of New York are wonderful for children. You’re free on the street as a child. In summertime, you could play on the street till ten o’clock at night. Your mother would look out the window or someone else’s mother and say, “Come on, come back up to the house.” Sometimes a kid would go and sometimes another half hour would pass. There was always somebody there on the street. There were always children to play with.
My family talked politics at the table. I mean it was a normal conversation. My father would read the paper and say, “Goddamn.” They talked Russian to my grandmother who might answer in Yiddish or Russian, but mostly by the time I was growing up they spoke English at home, though they read Russian. My father got a Russian Socialist newspaper of some kind.
P&W: At the end of many of your stories, there is the sense that life just goes on. There’s no particular ending to the story. Your character Zagrowsky says, “I tell you what life is going on, you have an opinion, I have an opinion, life don’t have no opinion.”
GP: That was true for my family. At suppertime there would be, if everybody was there, my father and my mother, who were social democrats and very upset about the Soviet Union. Then there would be my aunt who was a communist, and my other aunt who was a zionist. There were big differences of opinion. They would talk and talk, and life went on no matter what.
I still remember my mother reading the newspaper at the table when I was a kid. Apparently the Nazi party has just gotten itself together, and Hitler is in power. It must be around 1939, maybe a little earlier. My mother says to my father, “Look, Zenia, it’s beginning again.” Those words— “it’s beginning again”—have reverberated in my ears all my life. It’s beginning again. The fear you hear in those words. As a person who has never really suffered any prejudice, I remember those words.
I have letters from 1912, 1914, in Russian, from a woman writing to my aunt Yuba. The woman writes, “I don’t know what to do about the boys. I don’t know what to do with the two of them. They’ve gotten some foolishness in their head. They are going to some farm and taking classes to learn how to be farmers. They want to go to Palestine. I tell them they can’t, they mustn’t do it, and they say, ‘But what have we here? We have nothing here.’” They’re right, she says, they have nothing here. There’s nothing here for them, and so, she says, I have to let them do what they want. But why do they want to be farmers? She’s horrified. What’s wrong with these children? They want to be farmers? In Palestine of all places?
P&W: There is such a strong, almost spoken voice to your stories. It feels like you are sitting there telling me the story. How did you discover this voice? GP: I read a lot. In poetry, I liked W. H. Auden more than anyone. I loved British writers and the novels I grew up with, Twain, Dickens, and so on. I was not influenced say by Walt Whitman or anyone like that. His freedom was not my freedom, and so it didn’t affect me. But Saul Bellow had begun to write already. He freed the Jewish voice in some ways that I didn’t even recognize, but his work was all about men. Still, for Jews who are crazy about the English language, he was the one.
My father must have told us Bible stories, because I had Biblical stories bred in me from early on, and I don’t know from where. It wasn’t my grandmother so much. I am very interested in the Bible. It’s the King James version that I know, which is also great English literature. I think it had an effect on me because I’ve read the Bible a lot. I love the style of the King James Bible more than anything else. I was always a big reader, and I read good literature. The reason I mention this is because I keep telling students, “You’ve got to read.” We have a great tradition in English literature. We’re very lucky. We have this big English language, which is so receptive of other languages. English takes everything in. The French have laws that you can’t say this, you can’t say that, but in English you can say any god-damned thing you want, you know.
P&W: You began to write prose relatively late. You had been writing poetry before that. What was it that led you to start writing prose?
GP: Well, I’ll tell you, something funny happened to me. I thought I’d like to try to write stories, and it turned out that I had a lot of subject matter, which I didn’t realize at first. At first I just had the first story I wrote. I was amazed when I finished it. I couldn’t believe it. I suddenly had this large subject matter of the lives of women. I found this subject matter because I’d been spending much of my days with women and children in a way that I hadn’t before, in Washington Square Park mostly.
You see, nothing happens without political movement. Now it just so happens that when I started writing prose, the women’s movement was coming together. I didn’t know this. What happens is that you’re part of something without knowing it. The black power movement had a literature that lived with it, that supported it. So the women’s movement began to develop. Tillie Olson and I didn’t know it, but we were part of a movement. I became more and more interested in the lives of women, and I couldn’t write about this in poetry. I didn’t know how to write about this material in poetry. I can now, but I couldn’t do it then. So I had these stories, and I began to write them. I wrote them slowly over fifteen, twenty years. Really not much, but that was the basic voice that I had, and it was a normal voice to be writing in at that time, but I didn’t know this. I mean, I was not doing it on purpose. I tried writing from men’s points of view. I have a few stories from men’s point of view, from people of different color, different races, but basically my material was women’s lives, and I was a part of what was happening at that time, that’s all.
The poetry improved my prose, but the prose was equally good for my poetry. It loosened it up and made me more relevant to myself.
P&W: Were you concerned that because you wrote about women’s lives, your work might not be taken as seriously?
GP: I was very surprised by how well I was received. My experience was that men’s writing was interesting, and I really thought that for most people the lives of women would be very narrow in their appeal. But I couldn’t help the fact that I had not gone to war, and I had not done the male things. I had lived a woman’s life and that’s what I wrote about.
I’ll tell you an interesting thing, at least interesting to me. The poetry before I began to write stories, some of it, was very literary. I was a big reader. I was a big imitator, too. I sounded like I was a little bit British in my poetry. The fact that I came from the Bronx was irrelevant. When I began to write stories, I had the luck of having written poetry so that I had the language in my mouth. On the other hand, it was much looser since it was prose. That had a great effect on me when I continued to write poetry. The poetry improved my prose, but the prose was equally good for my poetry. It loosened it up and made me more relevant to myself.
P&W: Did you know when you first wrote about the character Faith who appears in so many of your stories that you would keep writing about her? And is there any significance to your choice of the name Faith?
GP: No. I didn’t know that I would keep writing about her. You wouldn’t believe this, but I like to make jokes, so I had this crazy idea that I would have a family in my stories with the names Faith, Hope, and Charlie. That was my dopey idea. It never worked, but she was stuck with the name Faith.
I want people to look at the world and see what's happening to it and take some action.
P&W: What led you to keep writing about her?
GP: Because she was a good worker. She did the job; she told the story. She seemed to have some brains. She had a sense of humor. She worked for me. Faith is not me; her life is entirely different from mine. My children lived with their father until they were twenty years old, and I was not a single mother, ever, not for five minutes. So Faith’s life is not mine, but she could have been one of my friends.
P&W: What advice do you give to younger writers?
GP: Have a low overhead. Don’t live with anybody who doesn’t support your work. Very important. And read a lot. Don’t be afraid to read or of being influenced by what you read. You’re more influenced by the voice of childhood than you are by some poet you’re reading. The last piece of advice is to keep a paper and pencil in your pocket at all times, especially if you’re a poet. But even if you’re a prose writer, you have to write things down when they come to you, or you lose them, and they’re gone forever. Of course, most of them are stupid, so it doesn’t matter. But in case they’re the thing that solves the problem for the story or the poem or whatever, you’d better keep a pencil and a paper in your pocket. I gave this big advice in a talk, and then about three hours later I told a student I really liked his work and asked how I could get in touch with him. He said he would give me his name and address. I looked in my pocket, and I didn’t have any pencil or paper.
P&W: I heard you speak years ago, and you said that you had some stories that had taken thirty years for you to find a way to tell. What was it that allowed you to finally tell the stories and why do some stories take so long?
GP: Well, that’s just me. I’m willing to let it go until it happens. I’m not going to push it too hard. Why should I? I mean, I don’t make a lot of money anyway, so if I finish this story I’ll be lucky if someone will publish it. Whether it’s a magazine that pays or a magazine that doesn’t pay will do me equally good. I don’t feel pushed, as far as that’s concerned. Most of the living I make is from giving readings. I never made a lot of money writing, anyway.
I struggle to be truthful to myself. I think that’s what literature is about; it’s the struggle for truth. It’s the struggle for what you don’t understand. So as long I don’t understand things I will be able to write, but once I understand everything, I won’t be able to write any more. There are things you want to understand. That is what writing is about. What kept me going writing stories is that all of a sudden I found the form I could use to try to understand in dialogue the people I’d been living with, the women I knew, and to try to make some history out of it somehow.
P&W: You have said that when you are a poet, you speak to the world, and when you are a story writer you get the world to speak to you. Could say more about this?
GP: In prose I do get the world to speak to me so I can understand it better, but it’s the same thing in poetry—speaking out to the world but also getting the world to speak to you. In writing both poetry and prose, you come from not understanding to trying to understand. In prose, you get these people to talk and figure things out for you, but in poetry you are on your own. So in poetry you’re really speaking more to yourself, addressing yourself and trying to understand something. But both voices, prose and poetry, are mysterious. You have to be a very good listener to be a writer. I talk a lot, but I’m a good listener with people. I’m interested in people, but I also like them. I’m very lucky in that because there are a lot of embittered people, grouchy people, writing books.
P&W: Does writing allow you to have moments of understanding?
GP: You have those experiences if you’re writing very often. You don’t know that you understand, but sometimes you have characters talking to each other and the purpose of their conversation is for you to understand something about them, which could happen without your knowing it. In a way, you keep writing to understand. You don’t do it, and then say, “Oh now, I understand, the story’s over.” You’re left pretty much still wondering, so there is that wonder and mystery.
Just looking out at the countryside here, I find it so amazing. If you look out that window, it’s so amazing, and the countryside is being murdered. People don’t understand what is being done to their countryside. In some parts of the world, they seem to understand it better than here. Here we don’t seem to get it that the fields are being wrecked by poisons and the air is close to the end of breathable. There is a great effort in America to stay happy and not worry and not understand and not do anything about it.
P&W: How do you see the future for this country?
GP: We have a big election coming up, and that’s on my mind. This administration is very dangerous, not just bad, but they’re really scary. I don’t remember anything like it. I didn’t like Reagan at all, and he did terrible things, but he was not like this administration.
I want people to look at the world and see what’s happening to it and take some action. This planet is so lovable. It is so various and so lovable, including all sorts of parts of the world that I’ve never seen, and I’ve seen more than most people. Just in what your eyes see, and how people live on the earth, it’s amazing, but it’s going to end if we don’t get our leaders to pay attention.
Human beings come from some little amoeba or paramecium. That’s what I learned in biology. Human beings come from several million years of development, which is quite wonderful. I have a lot of regard for what human beings have become. It took us a million years to learn how to speak to each other, and we did it. It took us another million years to work with each other, and we did it. I think the human race is remarkable. If it could only be nice to other animals, it would be even better. Meanwhile, it’s just like any other animal. It’s abusive and consumes the other species. That implies that we should all be vegetarian. Well in a sense, I am saying that. Until we live in a world where we stop abusing each other and the other creatures, we will not have reached our perfection.
