Word: northerner
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...situation in Northern Ireland has seen great progress towards peace. Does this give you hope for other ethnic and religious conflicts in the world...
...Everybody in Northern Ireland is infected—well, you’re either one tribe or the other, one guy or the other guy. Your calling as a humanist, as an intelligent creature, is to outstrip the conditions which you are landed with, to get some vision of a cultivated, tolerant, civic society. No matter how well-disposed you are, no matter how personally irreproachable your political or religious attitudes, you dwell in a place which is troubled. You’re answerable to that, especially when violence erupts, and lives are being lost, and lives are being taken...
...being played out in the institution is quite a dangerous energy on the streets. What you want, if possible, is some institutional shape that allows dangerous voltage to enter and work and drive the institution. It doesn’t mean that sectarianism or opposition has gone away in Northern Ireland; it means that there’s a kind of future-seeking possibility in the institution...
...person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. You grew up vigilant because it’s a divided society. My poetry on the whole was earth-hugging, but then I began to look up rather than keep down. I think it had to do with a sense that the marvelous was as permissible as the matter-of-fact in poetry. That line is from a poem called “The Gravel Walks,” which is about heavy work—wheeling barrows of gravel—but also the paradoxical sense of lightness when you?...
...admit that I’m trading in stereotypes here, and almost certainly oversimplifying the matter. Virginia is, in a sense, a microcosmic battleground for the dreaded and dreary culture wars. I hail from the prosperous, expanding, and relatively liberal northern Virginia suburbs, which have been a huge factor in the Democrats’ optimistic forecasts. In the same way Americans abroad, out of a sense of propriety, claim to be Canadians, I usually tell Cantabridgians that I’m from Washington D.C. I’ve never actually met any Appalachian Virginians, but I’ve always...