Life & Wisdom Quote by Tom Paulin

Paulin’s line lands with the cool impatience of someone who’s watched “sorry” become a bureaucratic verb. “Not very moved” is doing sly work: it’s not a grand denunciation, just an almost bored refusal to perform the expected emotion. The point isn’t that apologies are always bad; it’s that the ritual of historical apology often asks for sentiment instead of consequences.

The subtext is a critique of moral theater. Official apologies can function like symbolic laundering: they acknowledge harm while quietly protecting the structures that produced it. Paulin, a poet steeped in the politics of language and the contested histories of Britain and Ireland, knows how public statements get engineered to sound brave while remaining cost-free. An apology can be calibrated to satisfy today’s news cycle, then filed away without land returned, policies changed, or power redistributed. “Moved” becomes the trap: if you feel something, you’re presumed to have received something.

There’s also an aesthetic suspicion here, a poet’s allergy to inflated rhetoric. Historical apologies tend to arrive prepackaged in solemn cadences, drenched in “regret” and “lessons,” as if tone could substitute for repair. Paulin’s refusal reads as a demand for the harder genre: not elegy, but accounting. What would move him is the unpoetic stuff - reparations, institutional reform, admissions that don’t end in self-congratulation.

It’s a line that punctures a contemporary comfort: the belief that the past can be managed through language alone. Paulin’s wager is that history isn’t soothed by speech; it’s altered by action.