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J.K. Rowling Harvard Commencement Speech | Harvard University Commencement 2008
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SPEAKER: Last summer, in a grand celebration of literature,
Harvard Square and Harvard Yard, historically known
as the place for hallowed halls filled with books,
was transformed into Hogwarts Square.
[CHEERING]
This summer festival celebrated the midnight release
of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,
the seventh and final installment
in the wildly popular series.
Hordes of people, children and adults
alike, dressed in elaborate wizard costumes,
stood in line for hours at the Coop
to purchase copies of the book.
Dozens of restaurants and stores stayed open late and posted
Harry Potter-themed specials.
And a three-hour concert capped off
the evening in a packed Tercentenary Theatre.
Today, Tercentenary Theatre is once again
packed with children and adults.
And we are pleased to welcome one
of the most successful authors of our time.
Her books have set sales records and have won many awards,
probably because the Harry Potter stories provide
a familiar backdrop for readers who can empathize
with the young protagonist adrift in a sometimes
cruel and challenging world.
In addition to her vast contributions to literature,
she is also noted for the social, moral, and political
inspiration she has given her fans.
A notable philanthropist, she has established the Volant
Charitable Trust, which donates millions of dollars
to aid women and children and to combat
poverty and social inequality.
The--
[APPLAUSE]
The Fund also gives to organizations
that aid children, one-parent families, and multiple sclerosis
research.
She herself has noted that a person
has a moral responsibility, when you've
been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it
and to give intelligently.
And now I give you Ms. JK Rowling.
[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]
JK ROWLING: Thank you.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
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 honor,
but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured--
[LAUGHTER]
--at the thought of giving this commencement address have made
me lose weight--
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
--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.
[LAUGHTER]
[CHEERING]
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.
[LAUGHTER]
This liberating discovery enables me to proceed--
[LAUGHTER]
--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.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
You see, if all you remember in years to come
is the gay wizard joke, I've come out ahead
of Baroness Mary Warnock.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
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 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 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 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 the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil
now, but--
[LAUGHTER]
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.
Now, 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.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
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 humiliations and hardships.
Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts,
that is something on which to pride yourself.
But poverty itself is romanticized 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.
Now, I am not dull enough to suppose that,
because you are young, gifted, and well-educated,
you have never known hardbreak--
hardship or heartache.
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 removed from the average person's
idea of success, so high have you already flown.
[LAUGHTER]
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 for myself had both come to pass.
And by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I'm 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 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 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 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 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 learnt 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 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 20s by working
at the African Research Department of 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 hand-written eyewitness 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 a 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 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 mobilizes 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,
human beings 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 sympathize.
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 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 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 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 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 real trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me
when I took their names for Death Eaters.
[LAUGHTER]
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.
[LAUGHTER]
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.
[APPLAUSE, CHEERING]
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SPEAKER: Last summer, in a grand celebration of literature,
Harvard Square and Harvard Yard, historically known
as the place for hallowed halls filled with books,
was transformed into Hogwarts Square.
[CHEERING]
This summer festival celebrated the midnight release
of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,
the seventh and final installment
in the wildly popular series.
Hordes of people, children and adults
alike, dressed in elaborate wizard costumes,
stood in line for hours at the Coop
to purchase copies of the book.
Dozens of restaurants and stores stayed open late and posted
Harry Potter-themed specials.
And a three-hour concert capped off
the evening in a packed Tercentenary Theatre.
Today, Tercentenary Theatre is once again
packed with children and adults.
And we are pleased to welcome one
of the most successful authors of our time.
Her books have set sales records and have won many awards,
probably because the Harry Potter stories provide
a familiar backdrop for readers who can empathize
with the young protagonist adrift in a sometimes
cruel and challenging world.
In addition to her vast contributions to literature,
she is also noted for the social, moral, and political
inspiration she has given her fans.
A notable philanthropist, she has established the Volant
Charitable Trust, which donates millions of dollars
to aid women and children and to combat
poverty and social inequality.
The--
[APPLAUSE]
The Fund also gives to organizations
that aid children, one-parent families, and multiple sclerosis
research.
She herself has noted that a person
has a moral responsibility, when you've
been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it
and to give intelligently.
And now I give you Ms. JK Rowling.
[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]
JK ROWLING: Thank you.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
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 honor,
but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured--
[LAUGHTER]
--at the thought of giving this commencement address have made
me lose weight--
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
--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.
[LAUGHTER]
[CHEERING]
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.
[LAUGHTER]
This liberating discovery enables me to proceed--
[LAUGHTER]
--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.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
You see, if all you remember in years to come
is the gay wizard joke, I've come out ahead
of Baroness Mary Warnock.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
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 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 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 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 the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil
now, but--
[LAUGHTER]
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.
Now, 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.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
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 humiliations and hardships.
Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts,
that is something on which to pride yourself.
But poverty itself is romanticized 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.
Now, I am not dull enough to suppose that,
because you are young, gifted, and well-educated,
you have never known hardbreak--
hardship or heartache.
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 removed from the average person's
idea of success, so high have you already flown.
[LAUGHTER]
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 for myself had both come to pass.
And by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I'm 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 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 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 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 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 learnt 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 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 20s by working
at the African Research Department of 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 hand-written eyewitness 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 a 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 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 mobilizes 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,
human beings 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 sympathize.
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 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 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 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 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 real trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me
when I took their names for Death Eaters.
[LAUGHTER]
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.
[LAUGHTER]
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.
[APPLAUSE, CHEERING]