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