President Faust,members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of thefaculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.
The first thing Iwould like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me anextraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at thethought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-winsituation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red bannersand convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.
Delivering acommencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast mymind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was thedistinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on herspeech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out thatI can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables meto proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandonpromising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights ofbecoming a gay wizard.
You see? If allyou remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead ofBaroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.
Actually, I havewracked my mind 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 important lessonsI have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.
I have come upwith two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together tocelebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about thebenefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimescalled ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These may seemquixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back atthe 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortableexperience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I wasstriking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and whatthose closest to me expected of me.
I was convincedthat the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, myparents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whomhad been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was anamusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. Iknow that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.
So they hoped thatI would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. Acompromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up tostudy Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at theend of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classicscorridor.
I cannot remembertelling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found outfor the first time on graduation day. Of all the 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.
I would like tomake it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their pointof view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you inthe wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel,responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents forhoping 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 anennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimesdepression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing outof poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to prideyourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared mostfor myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
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At your age, inspite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far toolong in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, Ihad a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measureof success in my life and that of my peers.
I am not dullenough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, youhave never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yetinoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a momentsuppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege andcontentment.
However, the factthat you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not verywell-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite asmuch as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not betoo far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you alreadyflown.
Ultimately, we allhave to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quiteeager to give 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 my graduation day, Ihad failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage hadimploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to bein modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had hadfor me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by everyusual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am notgoing to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my lifewas a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press hassince represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then howfar the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was ahope rather than a reality.
So why do I talkabout the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away ofthe inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other thanwhat I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work thatmattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never havefound the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I trulybelonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I wasstill alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an oldtypewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation onwhich I rebuilt my life.
You might neverfail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It isimpossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiouslythat you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail bydefault.
Failure gave me aninner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failuretaught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. Idiscovered 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 ofrubies.
The knowledge thatyou have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, everafter, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself,or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested byadversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, andit has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
So given a TimeTurner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies inknowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Yourqualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people ofmy age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, andbeyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you tosurvive its vicissitudes.
Now you mightthink that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because ofthe part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though Ipersonally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I havelearned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not onlythe uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore thefount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative andrevelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humanswhose experiences we have never shared.
One of thegreatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though itinformed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation camein the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to writestories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working atthe African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters inLondon.
There in my littleoffice I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes bymen and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of whatwas happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared withouttrace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read thetestimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I openedhandwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, ofkidnappings and rapes.
Many of myco-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced fromtheir homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak againsttheir governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to giveinformation, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had leftbehind.
I shall neverforget 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. Hetrembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutalityinflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as achild. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Stationafterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my handwith exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as long as Ilive 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 neverheard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told meto run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had justhad to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness againsthis country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of myworking week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, tolive in a country with a democratically elected government, where legalrepresentation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I sawmore evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, togain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, aboutsome of the things I saw, heard, and read.
And yet I alsolearned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had everknown before.
Amnesty mobilisesthousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for theirbeliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leadingto collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whosepersonal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers tosave people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation inthat process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any othercreature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without havingexperienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this isa power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One mightuse such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand orsympathise.
And many prefernot to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortablywithin the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how itwould feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hearscreams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to anysuffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be temptedto envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have anyfewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a formof mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfullyunimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more,those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without evercommitting an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through ourown apathy.
One of the manythings I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured atthe 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 changeouter reality.
That is anastonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives.It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, thefact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
But how much moreare you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Yourintelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned andreceived, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even yournationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’sonly remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way youprotest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact waybeyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose touse your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who haveno voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with thepowerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives ofthose who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proudfamilies who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of peoplewhose 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 toimagine better.
I am nearlyfinished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already hadat 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends forlife. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able toturn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when Itook their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormousaffection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and,of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence thatwould be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I wishyou nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even ifyou remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, anotherof those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreatfrom 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 whatmatters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank-you very much.
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