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ISBN 978-0-316-36914-5

E3

President Faust, members of the

Harvard Corporation and the

Board of Overseers, members of

the faculty, proud parents, and,

above all, graduates.

thank

you

The first thing I would like to

say is “thank you.” Not only has

Harvard given me an extraordi-

nary honor, but the weeks of

fear and nausea I have endured

at the thought of giving this com-

mencement address have made

me lose weight. A win-win sit-

uation! 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 Baro-

ness Mary Warnock. Achievable

goals: the first step to self-

improvement.

Actually, I have racked 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 twenty-one years that have

expired between that day and this.

The

Importance

of

IMAgiNATiON

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.

UNEASY

BALANCE

These may seem quixotic or paradox-

ical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the twenty-one-year-

old that I was at graduation is a slightly

uncomfortable experience for the forty-

two-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.

personal

quirk

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 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

expiration 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 humil-

iations and hardships. Climb-

ing out of poverty by your

own efforts—that is something

on which to pride yourself,

but poverty itself is roman-

ticized 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, gift-

ed, and well-educated, you have

never known hardship or heartache.

Talent and intelligence never yet

inoculated anyone against the ca-

price of the Fates, and I do not for

a moment suppose that everyone

here has enjoyed an existence of un-

ruffled privilege and contentment.

So

high

have

you

already

flown

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.

I was the

biggest

failure

I knew

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 job-

less, 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 any-

thing 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 foun-

dation 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 qualifi-

cation I’ve ever earned.

humility

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 any-

one’s total control, and the humil-

ity 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 capa-

city, 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 Lon-

don.

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 out-

side world of what was happening

to them. I saw photographs of

those who had disappeared without

a 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 coworkers

were ex–political prisoners,

people who had been dis-

placed from their homes or

fled into exile because they

had the temerity to speak

against their governments.

Visitors to our offices in-

cluded those who had come

to give information, or to

try to 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 afterward, and

this man whose life had been

shattered by cruelty took my hand

with exquisite courtesy and wished

me future happiness.

A

SCREAM

OF

PAIN

AND

HORROR

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 out-

spokenness against his country’s

regime, his mother had been seized

and executed.

POWER

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 democrat-

ically elected government, where le-

gal representation and a public tri-

al were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence of

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 mobilizes thousands of people

who have never been tortured or im-

prisoned for their beliefs to act on be-

half of those who have. The power of

human empathy leading to collective ac-

tion saves lives and frees prisoners. Ordi-

nary people, whose personal well-being

and security are assured, join togeth-

er 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.

They

can

think

themselves

into

other

people’s

places

Unlike any other creature on

this planet, human beings can learn

and understand without having

experienced. They can think them-

selves 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.

They

can

refuse

to

know

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 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 Plu-

tarch: “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 bur-

den.

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 advan-

tages, 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 some-

thing that I already had at twenty-

one. 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.

I wish

you all

very

good

lives

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 Sen-

eca, another of those old Romans I

met when I fled down the Classics

corridor in retreat from career lad-

ders, 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J.K. Rowling is the author of the best-

selling Harry Potter series of seven

books, published between 1997 and

2007, which have sold over 450

million copies worldwide, are distri-

buted in more than 200 territories, are

translated into 78 languages, and have

been turned into eight blockbuster

films. Her first novel for adult readers,

The Casual Vacancy, was published in

September 2012 and her first two

crime novels, written under the

pseudonym Robert Galbraith, were

published in 2013 and 2014 respec-

tively.

As well as receiving an OBE for

services to children’s literature, J.K.

Rowling supports a number of causes

through her charitable trust, Volant.

She is also the founder and president

of the children’s charity Lumos, which

works to end the institutionalization

of children globally and ensure all

children grow up in a safe and caring

environment.

I founded Lumos to help end the incredibly

damaging practice of institutionalization. As

many as eight million children are currently

being raised in institutions worldwide.

The overwhelming majority are not

orphans. A wealth of expert opinion agrees

that institutionalization is extremely damaging

to children’s mental and physical health and

has a dire effect on their life outcomes.

It is my dream that within our lifetime the

very idea of institutionalizing children will

seem to belong to a cruel fictional world.

—J.K. Rowling,

Founder and President of Lumos

wearelumos.org

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Beginning