delivers her Commencement Address, "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the
Importance of Imagination," at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni
Association.</em>
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkREt4ZB-ck]
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 Harvard
given me an extraordinary honour, 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 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 enormously 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 Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first
step to self improvement.
Actually, I have wracked 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 learned 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 quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please 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 to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to 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 that 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
rounded 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
than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive
bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, 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 criticise 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 indeed something on
which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised 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.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and
well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. 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 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 am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That
period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to
be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale 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
a 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 I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest
fear had been realised, 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 won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever
earned.
So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal
happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list 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 to 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 empathise 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 20s by working at the African research department at 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, eye-witness 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 they 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 escorting 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 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
own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized
and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s 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.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will 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 mobilises 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, humans 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 to 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 agoraphobia, and that brings its own
terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often
more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise 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 18, 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 yet 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, likely to touch other
people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the
education you have earned and received, give you 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 change the world, we carry all the power we need inside
ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am 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 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 than 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 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.
J.K.Rowling
***********************************
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