SUPERB COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS

Thanks to the Internet, one of the best commencement addresses I have ever heard was given at Harvard University last June by J. K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter Books. Only 21 years older than most of the graduates, Rowling titled her address The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.

I have heard speeches on the importance of imagination, but I cannot remember hearing one on the benefits of failure. Rowling is well qualified to speak on both subjects.

She shares with us that she did not come from a wealthy family and that her parents wanted her to study modern languages in college. However, she wanted to study literature because she loved writing stories. Her parents thought that this was because she had a quirk in her nature. So a compromise was reached and she decided to study German. However, no sooner had her parents dropped her off at the college than she ditched German and walked down the corridor of the classics.

How did it go for her after college? She admits that she was a failure. Seven years after graduation, she had a failed marriage, a daughter whom she adored, no job, and a status that just about made her homeless. She does not blame her parents for this but asks:

“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 already 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.”

That’s when she started writing those Harry Potter Stories, which have made her famous and a millionaire many times over. That happened because she began to use her imagination. Here’s what she has to say about those who don’t:

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 can lead 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 may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

Rowling is telling each of us to learn from our failures and to use our imaginations if we have not been doing so. She concludes her address to the Harvard graduates with these words of Seneca:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

NOTE: You can hear this address by clicking on the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pucdJHjZaqs

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