Web Letters: Harlan County Blues

By Erik Reece

This article appeared in the July 17, 2006 edition of The Nation.

June 28, 2006

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  • This is a tardy correction, but the author is mistaken in the attribution below:

    At a recent commencement address here in Lexington, Nobel laureate and poet Seamus Heaney put it this way: Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but "something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for."

    In his 2006 commencement address, Heaney is explicitly quoting Vaclav Havel on hope (the passage is in Havel's book Disturbing the Peace). Reece may not have heard Heaney's attribution--or he may have confused it in his notes. It should be corrected in the on-line text, I would think.

    Stephen V. Kobasa

    New Haven, CT

    08/01/2008 @ 5:38pm


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