Eskişehir, Türkiye
Friday 5 April 2024
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute.
We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.
And the human race is filled with passion.
And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life.
But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
To quote from Whitman:
“O me! O life!
Of the questions of these recurring
Of the endless trains of the faithless
Of cities fill’d with the foolish
What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer:
That you are here — that life exists, and identity, that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
What will your verse be?
(Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society)
Teacher’s Instructions, Encounter 51, Wall Street English
Reading Summary
“An essayist argues that young people can and should share their knowledge and wisdom with older people.
For example, young people often usually know more about technology than older people do.
Social media is one way older people can stay in touch with friends and family.
Technology can also help older people remember medical appointments and manage their shopping lists.
Older people can become inactive and disconnected from society, but young people can help them get excited about new activities, such as learning another language.“
Audio Summary
“On the Housing Project’s 10th anniversary, a speaker describes this community program to reduce homelessness.
The Project has helped a 68-year-old woman who lost her home in a fire and a widower with three teenagers who could no longer afford to pay rent.
Volunteers work to raise money and build houses.
Some volunteers are employed, while others are unemployed or retired.“
Vocabulary
Can use language related to lifestyles and living conditions of different social groups
(community; homelessness; immigrant; the poor; retired; senior)
Can use language related to less traditional family relationships (adopt; foster; orphan;
orphanage; separated)
“On the board, write:
$1,000,000
Ask the students:
“What would you do if you won $1,000,000?“
Cue cards show pictures of senior citizens, a homeless man, teenagers, a rich man, an only child playing with his parents, foster or adopted children with their new family.
Objectives
Can use language related to lifestyles and living conditions of different social groups
(community; homelessness; immigrant; the poor; retired; senior)
Can use language related to less traditional family relationships (adopt; foster; orphan;
orphanage; separated)
Can provide extra information to define exactly which or what kind of person or thing
(This is the room that I wanted.)
Can summarize and give opinions on issues and stories and answer questions in detail
(It feels good to help people.)
Above: Coordinator Paul Greaney, Wall Street English, Eskişehir
This is always an interesting unit to teach and elicit conversation.
From my limited perspective as a Canadian expat who has lived in Türkiye since March 2021, I get a sense that there is a great sense of community here than back home in the West.
Berkcan (my student) and I discussed homelessness and its causes: rent and eviction, lack of work that pays a decent wage, lack of affordable housing, lack of health and social services, debt, divorce, death of the income provider, physical and/or mental health problems, discrimination, human and natural disasters, the failings of a foster care system, and, rarely, choice.
We spoke of the challenges of immigration for both the migrant / refugee and the land where he now finds himself seeking solace.
We spoke of the difficulties of being a senior citizen – a state very uncomfortably closer for me than Berkcan.
We spoke of the tightrope of the teenage years and the demise of the family, of how a rising rate of divorce has led to broken homes.
We spoke of only children, foster children and adopted children.
Until we were left with only unanswered questions.
“Where is he?”
“How do I know?” said Cal.
“Am I supposed to look after him?”
“We have only one story.
All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.
And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal.
Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.“
“The Hebrew word timshel — Thou mayest — that gives a choice.
It might be the most important word in the world.
That says the way is open.
That throws it right back on a man.
For if Thou mayest — it is also true that Thou mayest not.
Thou mayest makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth, he has still the great choice.
He can choose his course and fight it through and win.“
(John Steinbeck, East of Eden)
The International Day of Conscience is a global day of awareness celebrated on 5 April, commemorating the importance of human conscience.
It was established by the United Nations General Assembly on 25 July 2019, with the adoption of UN Resolution 73/329.
The first International Day of Conscience was celebrated on 5 April 2020.
Above: Flag of the United Nations
Conscience is a cognitive process that elicits emotion and rational associations based on an individual’s moral philosophy or value system.
Conscience stands in contrast to elicited emotion or thought due to associations based on immediate sensory perceptions and reflexive responses, as in sympathetic central nervous system responses.
In common terms, conscience is often described as leading to feelings of remorse when a person commits an act that conflicts with their moral values.
The extent to which conscience informs moral judgment before an action and whether such moral judgments are or should be based on reason has occasioned debate through much of modern history between theories of basics in ethic of human life in juxtaposition to the theories of romanticism and other reactionary movements after the end of the Middle Ages.
Religious views of conscience usually see it as linked to a morality inherent in all humans, to a beneficent universe and/or to divinity.
The diverse ritualistic, mythical, doctrinal, legal, institutional and material features of religion may not necessarily cohere with experiential, emotive, spirıtual or contemplative considerations about the origin and operation of conscience.
Common secular or scientific views regard the capacity for conscience as probably genetically determined, with its subject probably learned or imprinted as part of a culture.
Commonly used metaphors for conscience include the “voice within“, the “inner light“, or even Socrates’ reliance on what the Greeks called his “daimonic sign“, an averting inner voice heard only when he was about to make a mistake.
Above: The Good Samaritan, Vincent van Gogh, 1890
Conscience is a concept in national and international law, is increasingly conceived of as applying to the world as a whole, has motivated numerous notable acts for the public good and been the subject of many prominent examples of literature, music and film.
Above: Seated Buddha, 2nd century. The Buddha linked conscience with compassion for those who must endure cravings and suffering in the world until right conduct culminates in right mindfulness and right contemplation.
Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden was willingly jailed for refusing to pay a tax because he profoundly disagreed with a government policy and was frustrated by the corruption and injustice of the democratic machinery of the state.
“Unjust laws exist.
Shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavour to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?
A man has not everything to do but something.
And because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.
It is for no particular item in the tax bill that I refuse to pay it.
I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually.
I do not care to trace the course of my dollar if I could, till it buys a man, or a musket to shoot one with —the dollar is innocent — but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance.
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?
Why has every man a conscience, then?”
(Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1848)
Above: Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)
In a notable contemporary act of conscience, Christian bushwalker Brenda Hean (1910 – 1972) protested against the flooding of Lake Pedder despite threats and that ultimately led to her death.
Above: Lake Pedder, southwest Tasmania, taken between late 1968 and mid 1972, prior to the lake being enlarged by the construction of three dams
Another was the campaign by Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941 – 1995) against oil extraction by multinational corporations in Nigeria that led to his execution.
Above: Ken Saro-Wiwa
So too was the act by the Tank Man, or the Unknown Rebel photographed holding his shopping bag in the path of tanks during the protests at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on 5 June 1989.
Above: Tank Man (Tiananmen Square protester)
The actions of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld to try to achieve peace in the Congo despite the (eventuating) threat to his life were strongly motivated by conscience as is reflected in his diary, Vägmärken (Markings).
Above: Dag Hammarskjöld (1905 – 1961)
Another example involved the actions of Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr. to try to prevent the My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War.
Above: Hugh Tompson Jr. (1943 – 2006)
Evan Pederick voluntarily confessed and was convicted of the Sydney Hilton bombing stating that his conscience could not tolerate the guilt and that “I guess I was quite unique in the prison system in that I had to keep proving my guilt, whereas everyone else said they were innocent.”
Above: Sydney Hilton Hotel
Vasili Arkhipov was a Russian naval officer on out-of-radio-contact Soviet submarine B-59 being depth-charged by US warships during the Cuban Missile Crisis whose dissent when two other officers decided to launch a nuclear torpedo (unanimous agreement to launch was required) may have averted a nuclear war.
Above: Vasili Arkhipov (1926 – 1998)
In 1963, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc performed a famous act of self-immolation to protest against persecution of his faith by the Vietnamese Ngo Dinh Diem regime.
Above: Portrait of Bo Tat Quang Duc (1897 – 1963)
Conscience played a major role in the actions by anaesthetist Stephen Bolsin to whistleblow on incompetent paediatric cardiac surgeons at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.
Above: Stephen Bolson
Jeffrey Wigand was motivated by conscience to expose the Big Tobacco scandal, revealing that executives of the companies knew that cigarettes were addictive and approved the addition of carcinogenic ingredients to the cigarettes.
Above: Jeffrey Wigand
David Graham, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employee, was motivated by conscience to whistleblow that the arthritis pain-reliever Vioxx increased the risk of cardiovascular deaths although the manufacturer suppressed this information.
Rick Piltz, from the US global warming Science Program, blew the whistle on a White House official who ignored majority scientific opinion to edit a climate change report (“Our Changing Planet“) to reflect the Bush administration’s view that the problem was unlikely to exist.
Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist, was imprisoned and tortured for his act of conscience in throwing his shoes at George W. Bush.
Above: Muntadhar al-Zaidi
Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli former nuclear technician, acted on conscience to reveal details of Israel’s nuclear weapons program to the British press in 1986, was kidnapped by Israeli agents, transported to Israel, convicted of treason and spent 18 years in prison, including more than 11 years in solitary confinement.
Above: Mordechai Vanunu
At the awards ceremony for the 200 metres at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, John Carlos, Tommie Smith and Peter Norman ignored death threats and official warnings to take part in an anti-racism protest that destroyed their respective careers.
W. Mark Felt, an agent of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who retired in 1973 as the Bureau’s Associate Director, acted on conscience to provide reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with information that resulted in the Watergate scandal.
Above: Mark Felt (1913 – 2008)
Conscience was a major factor in US Public Health Service officer Peter Buxtun revealing the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to the public.
Above: Peter Buxton
The 2008 attack by the Israeli military on civilian areas of Palestinian Gaza was described as a “stain on the world’s conscience“.
Above: Flag of Palestine
Conscience was a major factor in the refusal of Aung San Suu Kyi to leave Burma (Myanmar) despite house arrest and persecution by the military dictatorship in that country.
Above: Aung San Suu Kyi
Conscience was a factor in Peter Galbraith’s criticism of fraud in the 2009 Afghanistan election despite it costing him his UN job.
Above: Peter Galbraith
Conscience motivated Bunnatine Greenhouse to expose irregularities in the contracting of the Halliburton company for work in Iraq.
Above: Bunny Greenhouse
Naji al-Ali (1938 – 1987), a popular cartoon artist in the Arab world, loved for his defense of the ordinary people, and for his criticism of repression and despotism by both the Israeli military and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), was murdered for refusing to compromise with his conscience.
Above: Naji al Ali graffitı, Ramallah, Palestine
The journalist Anna Politkovskaya provided (prior to her murder) an example of conscience in her opposition to the Second Chechen War (1999 – 2005) and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Above: Anna Politkovskaja (1958 – 2006)
Conscience motivated the Russian human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, who was abducted and murdered in Grozny, Chechnya in 2009.
Above: Portrait of Natalia Estemirova (1958 – 2009)
The death of Neda Agha-Soltan arose from conscience-driven protests against the 2009 Iranian presidential election.
Above: Neda Agha-Soltan (1983 – 2009)
Muslim lawyer Shirin Ebadi (winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize) has been described as the ‘conscience of the Islamic Republic‘ for her work in protecting the human rights of women and children in Iran.
Above: Shirin Ebadi
The human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, often referred to as the ‘conscience of China‘ and who had previously been arrested and allegedly tortured after calling for respect for human rights and for constitutional reform, was abducted by Chinese security agents in February 2009.
Above: Gao Zhisheng
2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo in his final statement before being sentenced by a closed Chinese court to over a decade in jail as a political prisoner of conscience stated:
“For hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation’s spirit.”
Above: Liu Xiaobo (1955 – 2017)
Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer in Russia, was arrested, held without trial for almost a year and died in custody, as a result of exposing corruption.
Above: Sergei Magnitsky (1972 – 2009)
On 6 October 2001, Laura Whittle was a naval gunner on HMAS Adelaide under orders to implement a new border protection policy when they encountered the SIEV-4 (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel-4) refugee boat in choppy seas.
After being ordered to fire warning shots from her 50-calibre machine gun to make the boat turn back she saw it beginning to break up and sink with a father on board holding out his young daughter that she might be saved.
Whittle jumped without a life vest 12 metres into the sea to help save the refugees from drowning thinking:
“This isn’t right.
This isn’t how things should be.“
In February 2012, journalist Marie Colvin was deliberately targeted and killed by the Syrian Army in Homs during the 2011 – 2012 Syrian uprising and Siege of Homs, after she decided to stay at the “epicentre of the storm” in order to “expose what is happening“.
Above: Marie Colvin (1956 – 2012)
In October 2012, the Taliban organised the attempted murder of Malala Yousafzai a teenage girl who had been campaigning, despite their threats, for female education in Pakistan.
Above: Malala Yousafzai
The December 2012 Delhi gang rape case was said to have stirred the collective conscience of India to civil disobedience and public protest at the lack of legal action against rapists in that country.
Above: Silent protest at India Gate related to 2012 Delhi gang rape case, 21 December 2012
In June 2013, Edward Snowden revealed details of the US National Security Agency (NSA) Internet and electronic communication PRISM surveillance program because of a conscience-felt obligation to the freedom of humanity greater than obedience to the laws that bound his employment.
Above: Edward Snowden
The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in A Very Easy Death (Une mort très douce, 1964) reflects within her own conscience about her mother’s attempts to develop such a moral sympathy and understanding of others.
“The sight of her tears grieved me, but I soon realised that she was weeping over her failure, without caring about what was happening inside me.
We might still have come to an understanding if, instead of asking everybody to pray for my soul, she had given me a little confidence and sympathy.
I know now what prevented her from doing so:
She had too much to pay back, too many wounds to salve, to put herself in another’s place.
In actual doing she made every sacrifice, but her feelings did not take her out of herself.
Besides, how could she have tried to understand me since she avoided looking into her own heart?
As for discovering an attitude that would not have set us apart, nothing in her life had ever prepared her for such a thing:
The unexpected sent her into a panic, because she had been taught never to think, act or feel except in a ready-made framework.”
(Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death, 1982)
Above: Simone de Beauvoir (1908 – 1986)
The ancient epic of the Indian subcontinent, the Mahabharata of Vyasa, contains two pivotal moments of conscience.
The first occurs when the warrior Arjuna being overcome with compassion against killing his opposing relatives in war, receives counsel from Krishna about his spiritual duty (“work as though you are performing a sacrifice for the general good“).
The second, at the end of the saga, is when King Yudhishthira having alone survived the moral tests of life, is offered eternal bliss, only to refuse it because a faithful dog is prevented from coming with him by purported divine rules and laws.
Above: The Mahabharata
The French author Montaigne (1533 – 1592) in one of the most celebrated of his essays (“On experience“) expressed the benefits of living with a clear conscience:
“Our duty is to compose our character, not to compose books, to win not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct.
Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live properly.”
Above: Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592)
In his famous Japanese travel journal Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North) composed of mixed haiku poetry and prose, Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694) in attempting to describe the eternal in this perishable world is often moved in conscience.
For example, by a thicket of summer grass being all that remains of the dreams and ambitions of ancient warriors.
Above: Portrait of Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694)
Chaucer’s “the Franklin’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales recounts how a young suitor releases a wife from a rash promise because of the respect in his conscience for the freedom to be truthful, gentle and generous.
Above: Portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 1400)
The critic A.C. Bradley discusses the central problem of Shakespeare’s tragic character Hamlet as one where conscience in the form of moral scruples deters the young Prince with his “great anxiety to do right” from obeying his father’s hell-bound ghost and murdering the usurping King (“isn’t perfect conscience to quit him with this arm?“).
Bradley develops a theory about Hamlet’s moral agony relating to a conflict between “traditional” and “critical” conscience:
“The conventional moral ideas of his time, which he shared with the Ghost, told him plainly that he ought to avenge his father, but a deeper conscience in him, which was in advance of his time, contended with these explicit conventional ideas.
It is because this deeper conscience remains below the surface that he fails to recognise it, and fancies he is hindered by cowardice or sloth or passion or what not, but it emerges into light in that speech to Horatio.
And it is just because he has this nobler moral nature in him that we admire and love him“.
The opening words of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 (“They that have pow’r to hurt, and will do none“) have been admired as a description of conscience.
Above: William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)
So has John Donne’s commencement of his poem Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward:
“Let man’s soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
Th’ intelligence that moves, devotion is;”
Above: John Donne (1571 – 1631)
Anton Chekhov in his plays The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters describes the tortured emotional states of doctors who at some point in their careers have turned their back on conscience.
In his short stories, Chekhov also explored how people misunderstood the voice of a tortured conscience.
A promiscuous student, for example, in The Fit describes it as a “dull pain, indefinite, vague.
It was like anguish and the most acute fear and despair in his breast, under the heart.”
The young doctor examining the misunderstood agony of compassion experienced by the factory owner’s daughter in From a Case Book calls it an “unknown, mysterious power in fact close at hand and watching him“.
Characteristically, Chekhov’s own conscience drove him on the long journey to Sakhalin to record and alleviate the harsh conditions of the prisoners at that remote outpost.
As Irina Ratushinskaya writes in the introduction to that work:
“Abandoning everything, he travelled to the distant island of Sakhalin, the most feared place of exile and forced labour in Russia at that time.
One cannot help but wonder why?
Simply, because the lot of the people there was a bitter one, because nobody really knew about the lives and deaths of the exiles, because he felt that they stood in greater need of help that anyone else.
A strange reason, maybe, but not for a writer who was the epitome of all the best traditions of a Russian man of letters.
Russian literature has always focused on questions of conscience and was, therefore, a powerful force in the moulding of public opinion.”
Above: Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904)
E.H. Carr writes of Dostoevsky’s character the young student Raskolnikov in the novel Crime and Punishment who decides to murder a ‘vile and loathsome‘ old woman money lender on the principle of transcending conventional morals:
“The sequel reveals to us not the pangs of a stricken conscience (which a less subtle writer would have given us) but the tragic and fruitless struggle of a powerful intellect to maintain a conviction which is incompatible with the essential nature of man.”
Above: Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881)
Hermann Hesse wrote his Siddhartha to describe how a young man in the time of the Buddha follows his conscience on a journey to discover a transcendent inner space where all things could be unified and simply understood, ending up discovering that personal truth through selfless service as a ferryman.
Above: Hermann Hesse (1877 – 1962)
J.R.R. Tolkien in his epic The Lord of the Rings describes how only the hobbit Frodo is pure enough in conscience to carry the Ring of Power through war-torn Middle Earth to destruction in the Cracks of Doom, Frodo determining at the end to journey without weapons, and being saved from failure by his earlier decision to spare the life of the creature Gollum.
Above: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892 – 1973)
Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote that Albert Camus was the writer most representative of the Western consciousness and conscience in its relation to the non-Western world.
Above: French philosopher / writer Albert Camus (1913 – 1960)
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird portrays Atticus Finch as a lawyer true to his conscience who sets an example to his children and community.
Above: Harper Lee (1926 – 2016)
The Robert Bolt play A Man For All Seasons focuses on the conscience of Catholic lawyer Thomas More in his struggle with King Henry VIII (1491 – 1547):
“The loyal subject is more bounden to be loyal to his conscience than to any other thing.”
Above: Thomas More (1478 – 1535)
George Orwell wrote his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four on the isolated island of Jura, Scotland to describe how a man (Winston Smith) attempts to develop critical conscience in a totalitarian state which watches every action of the people and manipulates their thinking with a mixture of propaganda, endless war and thought control through language control (double think and newspeak) to the point where prisoners look up to and even love their torturers.
In the Ministry of Love, Winston’s torturer (O’Brien) states:
“You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us.
But we create human nature.
Men are infinitely malleable.”
Above: Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) (1903 – 1950)
A tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica depicting a massacre of innocent women and children during the Spanish Civil War is displayed on the wall of the United Nations building in New York City, at the entrance to the Security Council room, demonstrably as a spur to the conscience of representatives from the nation states.
Above: Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937
Albert Tucker painted Man’s Head to capture the moral disintegration, and lack of conscience, of a man convicted of kicking a dog to death.
Above: Antipodean Head, Albert Tucker, 1964
The impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo in 1878 that:
“One must never let the fire in one’s soul die, for the time will inevitably come when it will be needed.
And he who chooses poverty for himself and loves it possesses a great treasure and will hear the voice of his conscience address him every more clearly.
He who hears that voice, which is God’s greatest gift, in his innermost being and follows it, finds in it a friend at last, and he is never alone!
That is what all great men have acknowledged in their works, all those who have thought a little more deeply and searched and worked and loved a little more than the rest, who have plumbed the depths of the sea of life.“
Above: Self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890)
The 1957 Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal portrays the journey of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) returning disillusioned from the Crusades (“What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe, but aren’t able to?“) across a plague-ridden landscape, undertaking a game of chess with the personification of Death until he can perform one meaningful altruistic act of conscience (overturning the chess board to distract Death long enough for a family of jugglers to escape in their wagon).
Casablanca (1942) centers on the development of conscience in the cynical American Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in the face of oppression by the Nazis and the example of the resistance leader Victor Laszlo.
The David Lean and Robert Bolt screenplay for Doctor Zhivago (an adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s novel) focuses strongly on the conscience of a doctor-poet in the midst of the Russian Revolution.
(In the end “the walls of his heart were like paper“.)
The 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner focuses on the struggles of conscience between and within a bounty hunter (Rick Deckard) and a renegade replicant android (Roy Batty) in a future society which refuses to accept that forms of artificial intelligence can have aspects of being such as conscience.
Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his last great choral composition the Mass in B minor to express the alternating emotions of loneliness, despair, joy and rapture that arise as conscience reflects on a departed human life.
Here Bach’s use of counterpoint and contrapuntal settings, his dynamic discourse of melodically and rhythmically distinct voices seeking forgiveness of sins (“Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis“) evokes a spiraling moral conversation of all humanity expressing his belief that “with devotional music, God is always present in his grace“.
Above: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750)
Ludwig van Beethoven’s meditations on illness, conscience and mortality in the Late Spring Quartets led to his dedicating the 3rd movement of String Quartet in A Minor Op. 132 as a “hymn of Thanksgiving to God of a convalescent“.
Above: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827)
John Lennon’s work “Imagine” owes much of its popular appeal to its evocation of conscience against the atrocities created by war, religious fundamentalism and politics.
The Beatles George Harrison-written track “The Inner Light” sets to Indian raga music a verse from the Tao Te Ching that:
“Without going out of your door you can know the ways of Heaven.”
In the 1986 movie The Mission the guilty conscience and penance of the slave trader Mendoza is made more poignant by the haunting oboe music of Ennio Morricone (“On Earth as it is in Heaven“).
The song “Sweet Lullaby” by Deep Forest is based on a traditional Baegu lullaby from the Solomon Islands called “Rorogwela” in which a young orphan is comforted as an act of conscience by his older brother.
The Dream Academy song ‘Forest Fire‘ provided an early warning of the moral dangers of our ‘black cloud‘ ‘bringing down a different kind of weather, letting the sunshine in, that’s how the end begins“.
The American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) presents the Conscience in Media Award to journalists whom the Society deems worthy of recognition for demonstrating “singular commitment to the highest principles of journalism at notable personal cost or sacrifice“.
The Ambassador of Conscience Award, Amnesty International’s most prestigious human rights award, takes its inspiration from a poem written by Irish Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney called “The Republic of Conscience“.
Above: Seamus Heaney (1939 – 2013)
Conscience is a man’s compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one’s course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.
(Vincent van Gogh, Dear Theo: the Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh)
Above: Still life with Bible, Vincent van Gogh, 1885
Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer’s day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land
Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they’ll listen now
Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent’s eyes of china blue
Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist’s loving hand
Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they’ll listen now
For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night
You took your life, as lovers often do
But I could’ve told you Vincent
This world was never meant for
One as beautiful as you
Starry, starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frame-less heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget
Like the strangers that you’ve met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn of bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow
Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will
Above: The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh, 1889
Sources
- Wikipedia
- Google Photos
- Dead Poets Society (film) (1989)
- Wall Street English
- East of Eden, John Steinbeck
- Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau
- A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir
- Essays, Michel de Montaigne
- Hamlet, William Shakespeare
- “Sonnet 94“, William Shakespeare
- “Good Friday 1613“, John Donne
- Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
- Dear Theo: An Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh
- The Seventh Seal (film)(1957)
- Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
- “Starry, Starry Night“, Don McLean