J.K. Rowling's Commencement Address in 2008

J.K. Rowling, author  of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement  Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,”  at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association. 

Text as delivered  follows.  

Copyright of JK  Rowling, June 2008 

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 Harvard given me an  extraordinary honour, 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 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 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 Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self 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 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  quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please 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 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 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 that 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 rounded 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 than Greek  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 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 criticise 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 indeed something on which to  pride yourself, 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 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. 

I am not dull enough  to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have  never known hardship or heartbreak. 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 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 am 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  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 I believed I  truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised,  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 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 check-list 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 to 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 empathise 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 20s by working at  the African research department at 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, eye-witness 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 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 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 own outspokenness 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 will 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 mobilises  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, humans 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 to 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 agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully  unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.  

What is more, those  who choose not to empathise 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 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 change the  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 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 than 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 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.