[Applause]
President F,
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 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 that 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 Warick.
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 Warner.
Achievable 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
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 quickotic 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
42year-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 of
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, but
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 of the
corner at the end of the road. Then 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 hardput to
name one less useful than Greek
mythology when it came to securing the
keys to an executive bathroom.
Now, 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 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 enabling 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 dull 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 was a dark one
and I had no idea that there was going
to be what the press has si 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 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 botton 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
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 leared 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 f 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
20ies 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 tmerity to speak
against their governments.
Visitors to our offices included those
who have who had come to give
information or to try and find out what
had happened to those who 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
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
outspokenenness 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 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 sympathize.
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
agrophobia, 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 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 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 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 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.
[Applause]
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 Senica, 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.