J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement

president Fausto 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 half has given me an extraordinary honor but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured the The idea of ​​giving this graduation speech has made me lose weight, a win-win situation. Now all I have to do is take a deep breath, squint at the red banners, and convince myself that I'm at the biggest Gryffindor reunion in the world. Giving a

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speech is a big responsibility, or so I thought until I thought about my own graduation again.

The

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speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher, Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on Lee's speech has helped me enormously in writing this because it turns out I can't remember a single word. She said this liberating discovery allows me to continue without any fear that I may inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the dizzying pleasures of becoming a gay magician. If all you remember for years to come is the gay magician joke. I left ahead of the baroness. Marijuana achieved Abul's goals. The first step to personal improvement. Actually, I have wrapped my mind and heart around what I should tell 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 between that day and this. I have found two answers on this wonderful day when we gather 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 like ethical or paradoxical choices, but be patient. Looking back at the 21-year-old I was at graduation is a bit of an uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old she has become half of my life ago.

She was striking an uncomfortable balance between the ambition she had for me and what those closest to me talk to me about. What was expected of me was that I was convinced that all I wanted to do was write novels; However, my parents, who came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had attended college, considered my overactive imagination to be a fun personal quirk that would make me happy. I never paid a mortgage or secured a pension. I know irony now strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, so they expected me to get a vocational degree.

I wanted to study English literature. A compromise was reached that, in retrospect, satisfied no one and I went up. To study Modern Languages, as soon as my parents drove the car to the corner at the end of the street, I left German and snuck through the classics corridor. I don't remember telling my parents that I was studying classics that they might as well have learned for the first time. moment on graduation day of all the subjects on this planet I think you would have been hard-pressed to name a less useful Greek mythology when it comes to securing the keys to an executive bathroom now I would like to make it clear in parentheses that Don't blame my parents for His point of view.

There's an expiration date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction the moment you're old enough to take the wheel. The responsibility is yours. What's more, I can't fault my parents for being hopeful. that I would never experience poverty, they had been poor themselves and I have been poor ever since and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty implies fear and stress and, sometimes, depression, it means a thousand small humiliations and difficulties in getting out of poverty. By your own efforts that is something to be proud of, but poverty itself is only romanticized by fools.

What I feared most about myself at your age was not poverty, but failure at your age, despite a clear lack of motivation at the University where I had studied. I spent too much time in the cafeteria writing stories and too little time in lectures. I had a knack for passing exams and that for years had been the measure of success in my life and that of my classmates. Now I'm not done enough to guess. that because you are a talented and well-educated young man you have never known anguish, hardship or anguish, talent and intelligence have never inoculated anyone against the whim of fate and I do not suppose for a moment that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of quiet privilege and satisfaction, yet the fact that he is graduating from Harvard suggests that he is not very familiar with failure;

You may be driven by both the fear of failure and the desire for success; In fact, your conception of failure may not be very far from reality. The average person's idea of ​​success is so high that you've already blown away, ultimately we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is very eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it, so which I think is fair to say by any conventional standard. Measured just seven years after my graduation day I had failed on an epic scale an exceptionally short marriage had imploded and I was unemployed a single parent and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless the fears that my parents What he had had for me and what he had had for me had been fulfilled, and by all usual standards, I was the biggest failure he knew.

Now I'm not going to sit 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 portrayed as some 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 we shed ourselves? the non-essential? I stopped pretending that I wasn't what I was and started directing all my energy into finishing the one thing. work that mattered to me, if I had truly succeeded in anything else, I may never have found the determination to succeed in the only field I believed I truly belonged in.

I was free because my greatest fear had come true and I was still alive and I still had a daughter I adored and I had an old typewriter and a great idea, and so hitting rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. life. You may never fail on the scale that I failed, 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 confidence that I had never achieved when passing exams.

Failure taught me things about myself that I had never achieved. I couldn't have learned any other way I discovered that I had a strong will and more discipline than I had suspected I also discovered that I had friends whose value was actually above the price of rubies The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger than the Setbacks mean that you are always confident 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 to all, it is painfully one and has been worth more than any grade I have ever earned, so given time, Turner, I would tell my twenty-one year old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life It is not a checklist of acquisitions or achievements, your qualifications, your CV are not your life, although 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 of knowing what will allow them to survive its vicissitudes now they might think that I chose my second topic the importance of imagination for Some of it contributed to rebuilding my life, but it is not entirely true, although I will personally defend the value of bedtime stories until my last breath.

I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not just the exclusively human ability to visualize what is not. and therefore the source of all invention and innovation in its arguably most transformative and revealing capacity is the power that allows us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared. One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, although he informed a lot. From what I later wrote in those books, this revelation came in the form of one of my first day jobs, although I was writing stories during lunch hours.

I paid the rent when I was in my early twenties working in Amnesty's African research department. At the International headquarters in London, there, in my small office, I read hastily scribbled letters, smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who risked imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without a trace submitted to amnesty granted by their desperate relatives and friends I read the testimony of torture victims and saw photographs of their injuries I opened handwritten eyewitness accounts of summary trials and executions of kidnappings and rapes, many of my coworkers were former political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes or fled into exile because they had the temerity to speak out against their governments.

Among the visitors to our offices were those who had come to provide information or to try to find out what had happened to those they had left behind. I will never forget African torture. victim a young man no older than me at the time who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland trembled uncontrollably as he spoke to a video camera about the brutality that had been inflicted on him he was a foot taller than me and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the task of carrying him back to the subway station 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 will follow it.

I remember walking down an empty hallway and suddenly hearing from behind a closed door a scream of pain and horror like I had never heard since the door opened and the investigator stuck his head out and told me to run and make Al a hot drink. young man sitting with her, she had just broken the news to him that, in retaliation for his outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been kidnapped and executed every day of my work week when she was in her early twenties. She reminded me how incredibly lucky she was. living 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 of the evils humanity would inflict on its 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 kindness at Amnesty International than I had 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 well-being and personal safety are guaranteed band together in large numbers to save people they don't 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 about being in other people's shoes. Of course, this is a power like my kind of fictional magic that is morally neutral. They could use that ability as much to manipulate or control as to understand or sympathize, and many prefer not to exercise their imagination at all; They choose to remain comfortably within the limits of their own experience, never worrying about wondering how it would feel if they had been born differently.

They can refuse to listen to screams or look into cages. They can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not affect them. personally affected they may refuse to know. I may be tempted to envy people who can live that way except that I don't think they have fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in cramped spaces leads to a form of mental agraphobia and that brings its own terrors. I believe that the intentionally unimaginative see more monsters, are often more afraid, and furthermore, those of us who choose not to empathize with real monsters, because without ever having committed an act of absolute evil, we collude with them through our own apathy. , one of the many things I learned at the end ofthat classics corridor through which I ventured at the age of eighteen in search of monsters. of something that I could not define then was this written by the Greek author Plutarch what we achieve internally will change the external reality that is an amazing statement and is demonstrated a thousand times every day of our lives 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, 2008 Harvard graduates, casual about touching other people's lives? your intelligence your ability to work hard the education you have earned and received gives you unique status and unique responsibilities even your nationality sets you apart the vast majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower the way you vote the way they live the way they protest the pressure they put on their government has an impact far beyond their borders, that is their privilege and your burden if you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who do not have voice if you choose to identify not only with the powerful but also with the powerless if you retain the ability to imagine yourself in the lives of those Who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who will celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change.

We don't need magic to transform our world. We already carry all the power we need within us. We have the power to imagine better. I'm almost done. I have one last hope for you, which is something I already had at 21. The friends I sat with on graduation day have been my friends for life they are my children's godparents the people I have been able to turn to in times of real trouble people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for the Death Eaters at our graduation we were united by an enormous affection for our shared experience of a time that could never come back and of course knowing that we had some photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us were to run for prime minister, so today I wish you nothing better and similar friendships and tomorrow I hope that, even if they don't remember a single one.

My word, do you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans that I met when I fled down the corridor of the classics in retreat from the professional ladders in search of ancient wisdom as it is a story, that is life, not how long it is, but how good it is. That's what matters. I wish you all very good lives. Thank you very much.