Heaney told graduates that his equivalent of the Inuit people's 'short song inherited from the ancestors' was a question and answer he had memorized as a schoolboy in Northern Ireland, learning his catechism for religious knowledge class. The simplicity was the point — this was wisdom compressed to its most essential form. Coming from Heaney, the line carried particular weight. He was from Northern Ireland, 'an island where the border between the north and south of the country has created divisions, not only within the national territory, but within the national psyche.' He had spent his life writing about those divisions — between Catholic and Protestant, Nationalist and Unionist — and the violence they produced. For him to offer 'my neighbor is all mankind' as his parting counsel was not naivety but hard-won conviction, the answer of someone who had seen what happened when people decided their neighbors were only those who looked, spoke, and prayed like them.