[00:01.62]“Magic Mum”at Harvard University
[00:09.50]President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation
[00:12.77]and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty,
[00:15.73] proud parents, and, above all, graduates.
[00:19.77]The first thing I would like to say is thank you.
[00:22.73]Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour,
[00:25.79]but the weeks of fear and nausea
[00:28.09]I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address
[00:31.48] have made me lose weight. A win-win situation!
[00:34.87]Now all I have to do is take deep breaths,
[00:38.04]squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing
[00:41.21] I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.
[00:45.26]Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun.
[00:49.96]That period of my life was a dark one,
[00:52.70]and I had no idea that there was going to be
[00:55.33] what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution.
[00:59.80] I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time,
[01:04.62] any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
[01:08.99]So why do I talk about the benefits of failure?
[01:12.16]Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential.
[01:16.65]I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was,
[01:20.91]and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work
[01:25.18]that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else,
[01:29.45] I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena
[01:33.82]I believed I truly belonged to.
[01:35.90] I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised,
[01:40.49]and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored,
[01:44.87] and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.
[01:48.25] And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
[01:53.29]You might think that I chose my second theme,
[01:56.24] the importance of imagination,
[01:58.32]because of the part it played in rebuilding my life,
[02:01.27]but that is not wholly so.
[02:03.67]Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp,
[02:08.05]I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense.
[02:12.10] Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that
[02:17.35] which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation.
[02:21.29] In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity,
[02:25.44]it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans
[02:29.38] whose experiences we have never shared.
[02:32.55]So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships.
[02:36.82] And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine,
[02:41.41]you remember those of Seneca,
[02:43.60]another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor,
[02:47.97] in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
[02:51.80]As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is,
[02:56.17] but how good it is, is what matters.
[02:59.01]I wish you all very good lives.
[03:01.97]Thank you very much. |