The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvardgiven me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I'veexperienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me loseweight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squintat the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world'sbest-educated Harry Potter convention.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thoughtuntil I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker thatday was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflectingon her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns outthat I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enablesme to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you toabandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights ofbecoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I'vestill come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first steptowards personal improvement.
Actually, I have wracked 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 whatimportant lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between thatday and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gatheredtogether to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you aboutthe benefits 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 might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightlyuncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half mylifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had formyself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels.However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neitherof whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was anamusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.
They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study EnglishLiterature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and Iwent up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the cornerat the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classicscorridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they mightwell have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects onthis planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful thanGreek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parentsfor their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents forsteering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take thewheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parentsfor 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 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 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 Ihad spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too littletime 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.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted andwell-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent andintelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and Ido not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence ofunruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are notvery well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failurequite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure mightnot be too far from the average person's idea of success, so high have youalready flown academically.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, butthe world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I thinkit fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after mygraduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-livedmarriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it ispossible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parentshad had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and byevery usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That periodof my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what thepress has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no ideahow far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it wasa hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant astripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I wasanything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishingthe only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, Imight never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believedI truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already beenrealised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and Ihad an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solidfoundation 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 socautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, youfail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passingexaminations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned noother way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I hadsuspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly aboverubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means thatyou are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never trulyknow yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have beentested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfullywon, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.
Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self thatpersonal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisitionor achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you willmeet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, andcomplicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know thatwill enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
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 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 the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter,though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. Thisrevelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was slopingoff to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s byworking in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters inLondon.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out oftotalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to informthe outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those whohad disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families andfriends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of theirinjuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials andexecutions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displacedfrom their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to thinkindependently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who hadcome to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those theyhad been forced to leave behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I wasat the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in hishomeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about thebrutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed asfragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the UndergroundStation afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty tookmy hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor andsuddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such asI have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her headand told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. Shehad just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokennessagainst 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 incrediblyfortunate 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 will inflict on theirfellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literalnightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than Ihad ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisonedfor their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of humanempathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners.Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, jointogether 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 andinspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand,without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds,imagine themselves into other people's places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morallyneutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as muchas to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remaincomfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonderhow it would 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 tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do notthink they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrowspaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its ownterrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are oftenmore afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. Forwithout 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 whichI ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, wasthis, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will changeouter reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day ofour lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outsideworld, 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 otherpeople's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the educationyou have earned and received, give you unique status, and uniqueresponsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority ofyou belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the wayyou live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on yourgovernment, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, andyour burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf ofthose 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 thelives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be yourproud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions ofpeople whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not needmagic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselvesalready: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that Ialready had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been myfriends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I'vebeen able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not tosue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we werebound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could nevercome again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographicevidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for PrimeMinister.
So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow,I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember thoseof Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classicscorridor, in retreat 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 whatmatters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Advertisement
© 2008 The President and Fellows of Harvard
