The essay by Seamus Heaney in today's Weekend Reviewis the first in a series, devised in association with Amnesty Ireland, in which Irish writers reflect on the approach of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Each Saturday a different writer - the contributors will include Roddy Doyle, Jennifer Johnston, Carlo Gebler, Hugo Hamilton, Neil Jordan, Joseph O'Connor and others - will create an imaginative response to a specific article of the declaration. It is worth asking why the reactions of writers whose works inhabit invented worlds, should have anything important to say about a political and legal text.
One reason is that the declaration is itself a cultural statement. In these times, when there is so much talk of a "clash of cultures", it is easy to forget that there is a notion of human dignity, encapsulated in the declaration, that transcends religious, political and personal identities. That faith in the essential similarity of people is at the core of what imaginative writers do.
The less uplifting reason is that, in some respects, the Declaration remains a work of the imagination. All members of the United Nations may subscribe to it in theory, but it is disparaged and ignored by powerful regimes. It is most frequently evoked in response to the abuses that it has failed to prevent. It is thus a text which, like a novel or a poem, conceives of a world that does not really exist. As Heaney puts it so eloquently today, it shares with works of art the condition of being a "counterweight to the given actuality of the world".
One of the drafters of the declaration, Eleanor Roosevelt asked: "Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?" and answered: "In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world". She meant that its high-sounding phrases have to ring true in people's lives and become an intimate reality. We know only too well that this reality remains most conspicuous by its absence. The best way to change this, of course, would be to create a world where human rights are truly honoured. Failing that, however, the Declaration can be brought "close to home" by at least imagining what it means at the level of ordinary human experience. Writers have this power. It is in their gift to help us see the common values enshrined in the declaration in response to the carnage of the second World War, not as pious gestures, but as the flesh and blood of the human community.