J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement

president Faust members of the Harvard corporation and the Board of Overseers members of the faculty proud parents and above all graduates the first thing I would like to say is thank you not only has half had given me an extraordinary honor but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight a win-win situation now all I have to do is take deep breaths squint at the red banners and convince myself than up that I am at the world's largest Gryffindor reunion delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation the commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock reflecting on her speech has helped me enormous Lee in writing this one because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said this liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard you see if all you remember in years to come is the gay wizard joke I've come out ahead of Baroness marijuana achieve Abul goals the first step to self-improvement actually I have wrapped my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation and what important lessons I have learnt in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this I have come up with two answers on this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure and as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called real life I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination these may seem pricks otic or paradoxical choices but bear with me looking back at the 21 year old that I was at graduation is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42 year old that she has become half my lifetime ago I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself and what those closest talk to me expected of me I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever was write novels however my parents both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension I know the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil now so they hoped that I would take a vocational degree I wanted to study English literature a compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody and I went up to study Modern Languages hardly had my parents car round at the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the classics corridor I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying classics they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day of all the subjects on this planet I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful and Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom now I would like to make it clear in parentheses that I do not blame my parents for their point of view there is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction the moment you are old enough to take the wheel responsibility lies with you what is more I cannot criticize my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty they had been poor themselves and I have since been poor and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized only by fools what I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty but failure at your age in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at University where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories and far too little time at lectures I had a knack for passing examinations and that for years had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers now I am not done enough to suppose that because you are young gifted and well-educated you have never known heartbreak hardship or heartache talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the Caprice of the fates and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment however the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well acquainted with failure you might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success indeed your conception of failure might not be too far removed from the average person's idea of success so high have you already flown ultimately we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it so I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure a mere seven years after my graduation day I had failed on an epic scale an exceptionally short lived marriage had imploded and I was jobless a lone parent and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless the fears that my parents had had for me and that I had had for myself had both come to pass and by every usual standard I was the biggest failure I knew now I'm not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun that period of my life is a dark one and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairytale resolution I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended and for a long time any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality so why do I talk about the benefits of failure simply because failure meant us stripping away of the inessential I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me had I really succeeded at anything else I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believed I truly belonged I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized and I was still alive and I still had a daughter whom I adored and I had an old typewriter and a big idea and so rock-bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life you might never fail on the scale I did but some failure in life is inevitable it is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all in which case you fail by default failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way I discovered that I had a strong will and more discipline than I had suspected I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies the knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are ever after secure in your ability to survive you will never truly know yourself or the strength of your relationships until both have been tested by adversity such knowledge is a true gift for all that it is painfully one and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned so given a time Turner I would tell my twenty-one year old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a checklist of acquisition or achievement your qualifications your CV are not your life though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes now you might think that I chose my second theme the importance of imagination because of the part it played in rebuilding my life but that is not wholly so though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity envision that which is not and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation in its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared one of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books this revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours I paid the rent in my early twenties by working at the African research department of Amnesty International's headquarters in London there in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace sent to amnesty by their desperate families and friends I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries I opened handwritten eyewitness accounts of summary trials and executions of kidnappings and rapes many of my co-workers were ex political prisoners people who had been displaced from their homes or fled into exile because they had the temerity to speak against their governments visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information or to try and find out what had happened to those who had left behind I shall never forget the African torture victim a young man no older than I was at the time who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland he trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him he was a foot taller than I was and seemed as fragile as a child I was given the job of in scoring him back to the underground station afterwards and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy and wished me future happiness and as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing from behind a closed door a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since the door opened and the researcher poked out her out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her she had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his outspokenness against his country's regime his mother had been seized and executed every day of my working week in my early twenties I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was to live in a country with a democratically elected government where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone everyday I saw more evidence about the evils humankind would inflict on their fellow humans to gain or maintain power I began to have nightmares literal nightmares about some of the things I saw heard and read and yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before amnesty mobilizes thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have the power of human empathy leading to collective action saves lives and frees prisoners ordinary people whose personal well-being and security are assured join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know and will never meet my small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life unlike any other creature on this planet human beings can learn and understand without having experienced they can think themselves into other people's places of course this is a power like my brand of fictional magic that is morally neutral one might use such an ability to manipulate or control just as much as to understand or sympathise and many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all they choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are they can refuse to hear screams or peer inside cages they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally they can refuse to know I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental Agra phobia and that brings its own terrors I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters they are often more afraid what is more those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters for without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves we collude with it through our own apathy one of the many things I learned at the end of that classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of eighteen in search of something I could not then define was this written by the Greek author Plutarch what we achieve inwardly will change outer reality that is an astonishing statement and get proven a thousand times every day of our lives it expresses in part our inescapable connection with the outside world the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing but how much more are you Harvard graduates of 2008 lightly to touch other people's lives your intelligence your capacity for hard work the education you have earned and received give you unique unique status and unique responsibilities even your nationality sets you apart the great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower the way you vote the way you live the way you protest the pressure you bring to bear on your government has an impact way beyond your borders that is your privilege and your burden if you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice if you choose to identify not only with the powerful but with the powerless if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change we do not need magic to transform our world we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already we have the power to imagine better I'm nearly finished I have one last hope for you which is something that I already had at 21 the friends with whom i sat on graduation day have been my friends for life they are my children's godparents the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of real trouble people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters at our graduation we were bound by enormous affection by our shared experience of a time that could never come again and of course by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for prime minister so today I wish you nothing better and similar friendships and tomorrow I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine you remember those of Seneca another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the classics corridor in retreat from from career ladders in search of ancient wisdom as is a tale so is life not how long it is but how good it is is what matters I wish you all very good lives thank you very much

Channel: Harvard Magazine

Views: 4,239,013

Rating: 4.9195604 out of 5

Keywords: harvard, harry potter, jk rowling

Id: wHGqp8lz36c

Length: 20min 59sec (1259 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 15 2011