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President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Boardof 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 honor, but the weeks offear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving thiscommencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Nowall I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners andfool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated HarryPotter convention.
Delivering a commencement address is a greatresponsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my owngraduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguishedBritish philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech hashelped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that Ican't remember a single word she said. This liberating discoveryenables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertentlyinfluence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politicsfor the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? Ifall you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've stillcome out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the firststep towards personal improvement.
Actually, I have wracked mymind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have askedmyself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what importantlessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between thatday and this.
I have come up with two answers. On thiswonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academicsuccess, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure.And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'reallife', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Lookingback at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightlyuncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Halfmy lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambitionI had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
Iwas convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to writenovels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverishedbackgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view thatmy overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that couldnever pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.
They had hoped that Iwould take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. Acompromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I wentup to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded thecorner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled offdown the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling myparents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found outfor the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, Ithink they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greekmythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
Iwould like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame myparents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blamingyour parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment youare old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What ismore, I cannot criticize my parents for hoping that I would neverexperience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have sincebeen poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennoblingexperience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression;it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out ofpoverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to prideyourself, but poverty itself is romanticized only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
Atyour age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university,where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, andfar too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passingexaminations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success inmy life and that of my peers.
I am not dull enough to supposethat because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have neverknown hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yetinoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for amoment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffledprivilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you aregraduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquaintedwith failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much asa desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not betoo far from the average person's idea of success, so high have youalready flown academically.
Ultimately, we all have to decidefor ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager togive you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to saythat by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after mygraduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionallyshort-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent,and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without beinghomeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had formyself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was thebiggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here andtell 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 sincerepresented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how farthe tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of itwas a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about thebenefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away ofthe inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anythingother than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishingthe only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anythingelse, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the onearena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatestfear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still hada 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 mylife.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failurein life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing atsomething, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well nothave lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
Failuregave me an inner security that I had never attained by passingexaminations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could havelearned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and morediscipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friendswhose value was truly above rubies.
The knowledge that you haveemerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, everafter, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly knowyourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have beentested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it ispainfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualificationI ever earned.
Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I wouldtell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing thatlife is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Yourqualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet manypeople of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, andcomplicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility toknow that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
Youmight think that I chose my second theme, the importance ofimagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, butthat is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtimestories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a muchbroader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity toenvision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all inventionand innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatorycapacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humanswhose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatestformative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though itinformed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. Thisrevelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though Iwas sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rentin my early 20s by working in the research department at AmnestyInternational's headquarters in London.
There in my littleoffice I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarianregimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform theoutside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of thosewho had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperatefamilies and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and sawpictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accountsof summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Manyof my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had beendisplaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had thetemerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to ouroffice included those who had come to give information, or to try andfind out what had happened to those they had been forced to leavebehind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, ayoung man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally illafter all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably ashe spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. Hewas a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I wasgiven the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards,and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand withexquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as longas I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenlyhearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such asI have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked outher head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young mansitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliationfor his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother hadbeen seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in myearly 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in acountry with a democratically elected government, where legalrepresentation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Everyday, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict ontheir fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to havenightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heardand read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
Amnestymobilizes thousands of people who have never been tortured orimprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. Thepower of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, andfrees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being andsecurity are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people theydo not know, and will never meet. My small participation in thatprocess was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of mylife.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans canlearn and understand, without having experienced. They can thinkthemselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into otherpeople's places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand offictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an abilityto manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathize.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. Theychoose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience,never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born otherthan 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 nottouch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might betempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do notthink they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live innarrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that bringsits own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters.They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose notto empathize may enable real monsters. For without ever committing anact of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our ownapathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of thatClassics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search ofsomething I could not then define, was this, written by the Greekauthor Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
Thatis an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every dayof our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection withthe outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simplyby existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, yourcapacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received,give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even yournationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to theworld'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 yourburden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raiseyour voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose toidentify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if youretain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who donot have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud familieswho celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of peoplewhose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not needmagic to change the world, we carry all the power we need insideourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I amnearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something thatI already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day havebeen my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the peopleto whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who havebeen kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for DeathEaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by ourshared experience of a time that could never come again, and, ofcourse, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidencethat would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for PrimeMinister.
So today, I can wish you nothing better than similarfriendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not asingle word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those oldRomans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat fromcareer 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.
Copyright of J.K. Rowling, June 2008 |
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发表于 2009-10-19 20:42:27
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发表于 2009-10-19 21:10:17
