哈利波特作者對哈佛畢業生談失敗 (中/英) 文／整理/宋東

六月，莘莘學子邁入社會的季節。到底前途會怎樣？能不能實現夢想？ 

人人都希望自己像哈利波特，用魔法棒一指，就可以看到自己的過去與未來。都希望自己口念魔咒，就可以度過難關、一帆風順。 

六月初，《哈利波特》的作者羅琳（J.K. Rowling）卻在哈佛大學的畢業典禮，對像電影中從魔法學校畢業，走入社會的一群小魔法師說，「失敗，才是你人生中最自由的經驗。」 

而「想像」進入他人生命處境的能力，才是發揮自己一身法力的泉源……。 

事實上，為準備今天上台演講，我搜索枯腸地問自己，若我是畢業生，今天最想聽到什麼？以及，我大學畢業二十一年來，最大的學習是什麼？ 

答案有二。首先，在諸位歡慶自己學術生涯告一段落的今天，我想跟各位講講「失敗的益處」。其次，在各位跨進社會「現實生活」之前，我想提醒「想像力的重要」。

回想二十一年前，我的大學畢業典禮，對我現在這個四十二歲的人來說，真不是件容易的事。當時，我心中唯一想做的事就是寫小說，但我出身貧困，沒上過大學的父母，卻認為我滿腦子的想像，雖有娛樂價值，卻對還貸款、存退休金，一點用都沒有。 

今天我自己當了父母，才體會到當時他們的心情。他們一生貧窮，我畢業後也跟著進入貧窮，真的不好受。因為貧窮衍生出恐懼、壓力，甚至沮喪，在每天的日子裡加添著千百種細微的羞辱、辛苦。靠自己爬出貧窮的深淵，雖是值得驕傲的經驗，但隻有傻子才真希望經歷。 
但當時的我，不怕窮，怕的是失敗。 

我不會因你們年輕、聰明、教育程度高，就以為你們這輩子一點苦都沒吃過。但是，憑你們是世界最高學府哈佛大學的畢業生來看，你們應該是一路走來都還順遂的人。 

你們對成功的想望，應該跟你們對失敗的恐懼一樣巨大。說真的，你們對失敗的體驗，可能跟平常人對成功的體驗一樣少。 

失敗與自由 

最終，我們都要麵對如何定義失敗。因為這個世界真迫不急待地要塞些標準給你，讓你覺得自己一敗塗地。我畢業後第七年，就經歷過一次「巨大」的失敗。當時，我短暫的婚姻剛結束，沒工作、單親撫養孩子、窮途潦倒，差點就流離失所。我父母當初對我的擔憂、加上我自己對自己的擔憂，一併壓來，那是我一生中最大的失敗。 

那真不是件好玩的事，是我生命中最黑暗的時期，前途一片渺茫，也不知眼前的黑暗隧道還要走多久。這是為什麼我要談失敗的報償。因為，人在失敗時，我們被扒得一乾二淨，我必須停止假裝自己除了眼前的自己，還有任何其他層次的我。眼前唯一能做的，就是生存，最重要的事。當時若有任何其他希望，我也不可能專心投入我相信自己唯一能做的事。 

我有一種自由，因為我最大的恐懼已經過了，但我還活著，並且身邊還有個深愛的女兒陪我，有台老打字機、跟一個夢想。那是置之死地而後生的重建之路。 

失敗，讓我有種內在安全感，是以往通過所有考試都沒經歷過的。失敗，讓我學會認清自己，讓我發現自己有堅強的意誌、有不錯的紀律、有一群真的朋友。 

從失敗中學到的智慧、堅強，會增強你未來生存的能力。唯有經過考驗的自我、關係，才是真的；也唯有經過苦難贏得的價值，才值得珍惜。 

如果時光能倒流，我會跟二十一年前的自己說：人生真正的快樂不是我擁有了什麼東西、成就。你的文憑、履歷表，不代表你的人生，儘管許多比你老的人告訴你他們是。生命不簡單、複雜，且完全不可控製，愈早看清這個真相，你的生存能力就愈強。 

想像進入別人生命的能力 

今天要講的另個主題是想像力。我要說的不是創新、發明的想像力，而是能設身處地理解他人，甚至是想像出我們完全沒經歷過的處境、遭遇的能力。 

我在創作《哈利波特》之前，學到最多經驗、也在後來小說創作中不斷用到的經驗，就是我畢業後在「國際特赦組織」倫敦總部工作的經驗。那份工，是我二十幾歲時房租的來源。每天，我讀到從獨裁國家匆匆寫下、偷渡出來的陳情信；看到絕望家屬寄來無故失蹤人口的照片；整理受虐犯人的自白與照片。我的同事，多半都是之前被關過、失去家園的政治犯，隻因他們堅持跟政府不同的獨立觀點。 

除了苦難，這份工也讓我看到人性中美好的一麵。 
國際特赦組織的工作，感召千萬本身沒受過監禁、折磨苦難的人，挺身為別人奮鬥。這種同情、同理心激發出的群體行動，真是驚人。這群自身飽足、安全的人，願意伸手救助素昧平生的陌生人，是我這輩子最有啟發性的經驗。因為，人類是這個星球上唯一不用親身經歷，就有能力學習、了解別人處境的生物。我們可以設身處地、想像別人的心思。 

這種能力，像我小說中魔法的能力一樣，可正可邪。也就是說，人可以用這種能力去操縱、控製別人；也可以用這能力去了解、同情別人。 

但也有許多人，根本不願去用這種能力。他們選擇留在自己舒適的經驗裡，對別人的處境從不好奇、也不想知道生長在別種環境的人在想什麼。他們拒絕聽從身邊牢籠裡傳來的嘶喊，拒絕知道、看到自己親身以外的受苦心靈。 

你們──二○○八年哈佛畢業生中間，有多少人願意碰觸別人的人生呢？憑你們的聰明、努力、能力，不僅讓你們享有特殊的身分地位，同時也讓你們對世界有份特殊的責任。你們屬於當今世上稀有的「超級強權」，你們的政治選擇、生活方式，以及你們反對什麼、承擔什麼，影響都會跨越國界。這是你們的特權，也是你們的負擔。 

希望你們運用這份特權，為世上沒特權的那批人說說話。要替他們說話，就需要我剛說過的那種「想像力」，你若能設身處地「想像」進入他們的生命，那麼未來慶賀你人生的，就不光是你的家人，而是千萬個你幫助過的人。 

我們不需要魔法來改變世界，我們每個人天生就具備足夠的能量，可以「想像」進入一個更美好的世界。 

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

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.

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've experienced 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 fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.

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, 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 still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal 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 has 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 might 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 could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had 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 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 academically.

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 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 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 already 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 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 to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or 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.

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 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 in the 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 think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave 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 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 given 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 minds, imagine 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 can lead 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 may 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 transform for the better. 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, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used 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 can 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.