Episodes
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J.K. Rowling Harvard CommencementSpeech 2008
'The Fringe Benefits ofFailure, and the Importance of Imagination'
Text of J.K. Rowling’s speech
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 sayis ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but theweeks of fear and nausea I have endured at thethought of giving this commencement address havemade me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deepbreaths, squint at the red banners and convincemyself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindorreunion.
Delivering a commencement addressis a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my owngraduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished Britishphilosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting onher speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns outthat I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberatingdiscovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promisingcareers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delightsof becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember inyears to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’vecome out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock.Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say toyou 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 expiredbetween that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. Onthis wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academicsuccess, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And asyou stand on the threshold of what is sometimescalled ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucialimportance of imagination.
These may seem quixotic or paradoxicalchoices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-oldthat I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasybalance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to meexpected of me.
I was convinced that the only thingI wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whomcame from impoverished backgrounds and neitherof whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination wasan amusing personal quirk that would never pay amortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force ofa cartoon anvil, now.
So they hoped that I would take avocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise wasreached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, andI went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded thecorner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling myparents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for thefirst time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think theywould have been hard put to name one less useful thanGreek 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 theirpoint of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment youare old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, Icannot 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 agreewith them that it is not an ennoblingexperience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; itmeans a thousand petty humiliations andhardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeedsomething on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself atyour age was not poverty, but failure.
At your age, in spite of a distinctlack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffeebar 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 dullenough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, youhave never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the capriceof the Fates, and I do not for a moment supposethat everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffledprivilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you aregraduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fearof failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception offailure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so highhave you already flown.
Ultimately, we all have to decidefor ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to giveyou a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by anyconventional measure, a mere seven years aftermy graduation day, I had failed on an epicscale. An exceptionnally short-lived marriagehad 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 had for myself, hadboth come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure Iknew.
Now, I am not going to stand hereand tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and Ihad no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented asa kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light atthe end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefitsof failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. Istopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, andbegan 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 thedetermination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I wasset free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive,and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a bigidea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt mylife.
You might never fail on the scale Idid, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live withoutfailing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well nothave lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner securitythat I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me thingsabout myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had astrong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that Ihad friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
The knowledge that you have emergedwiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in yourability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of yourrelationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a truegift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than anyqualification I ever earned.
So given a Time Turner, I wouldtell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life isnot a check-list of acquisition or achievement.Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet manypeople of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, andcomplicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and thehumility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
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Now you might think that I chose mysecond theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played inrebuilding 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 muchbroader 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 arguablymost transformative and revelatory capacity, itis the power that enables us to empathise withhumans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formativeexperiences 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 dayjobs. Though I was sloping off to write storiesduring my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at theAfrican research department at AmnestyInternational’s headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letterssmuggled out oftotalitarian regimes by men and women whowere risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening tothem. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. Iread the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. Iopened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers wereex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fledinto exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitorsto our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try andfind out what had happened to those they had left behind.
I shall never forget the Africantorture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had becomementally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video cameraabout the brutality inflicted upon him. He was afoot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile asa child. I was given the job of escorting himback to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by crueltytook my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wishedme future happiness.
And as long as I live I shallremember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind aclosed door, a scream ofpain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and theresearcher poked out her head and told me to runand make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had togive him the news that in retaliation for hisown outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in myearly 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a countrywith a democratically elected government, where legal representation and apublic trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidenceabout the evils humankind will inflict on theirfellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literalnightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.
And yet I also learned more abouthuman goodness at Amnesty International than Ihad ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands ofpeople who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act onbehalf of those who have. The power of human empathy,leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinarypeople, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together inhuge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My smallparticipation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiringexperiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on thisplanet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They canthink themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like mybrand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such anability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose toremain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troublingto wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They canrefuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages;they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch thempersonally; they can refuse to know.
I might be temptedto envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think theyhave any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads toa form of mental agoraphobia, and that bringsits own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They areoften more afraid.
What is more, those who choose notto empathise enable real monsters. For withoutever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we colludewith it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned atthe end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, insearch of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greekauthor Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statementand yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part,our inescapable connection with the outsideworld, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you, Harvardgraduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence,your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, giveyou unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets youapart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remainingsuperpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, thepressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond yourborders. That is your privilege,and your burden.
If you choose to use your statusand influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if youchoose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if youretain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not haveyour advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrateyour existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you havehelped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the powerwe need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have onelast hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friendswith whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are mychildren’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times oftrouble, people who have been kind enough not to sueme when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound byenormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never comeagain, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionallyvaluable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I wish you nothing betterthan similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not asingle word of mine, you remember those of Seneca,another of those old Romans I met when I fleddown the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search ofancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is whatmatters.I wish you all very good lives.
Thank-you very much. -
Leonardodelivers landmark speech at the United Nations climate summit
On September 23, 2014 LeonardoDiCaprio addressed one of the largest gatherings of government, business andcivil society leaders in history, at the United Nations Climate Summit. UNSecretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed Leonardo to serve as a United NationsMessenger of Peace for Climate, calling the actor a “new voice for climateadvocacy.”
The Sunday, both both BanKi-moon and Leonardo participated in the 400,000-strong People’s Climate Marchthrough the streets of New York City, drawing renewed public attention to theescalating climate crisis.
The speech garnered a record-breaking 1.6million views on the United Nations channel and was echoed in over 45,000 newsarticles across the globe.
Below is the full text of the speech:
Thank you, Mr. Secretary-General, yourexcellencies, ladies and gentleman, and distinguished guests. I’m honored to behere today, I stand before you not as an expert but as a concerned citizen, oneof the 400,000 people who marched in the streets of New York on Sunday, and thebillions of others around the world who want to solve our climate crisis.
As an actor I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters often solving fictitious problems.
I believe mankind has looked at climatechange in that same way: as if it were a fiction, as if pretending that climatechange wasn’t real would somehow make it go away.
But I think we know better than that. Everyweek , we’re seeing new and undeniable climateevents, evidence that accelerated climate changeis here right now. Droughts are intensifying, our oceans are acidifying, with methaneplumes rising up from the ocean floor. We are seeing extreme weather events,and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice-sheetsmelting at unprecedented rates, decades ahead ofscientific projections.
None of this isrhetoric, and none of it is hysteria. Itis fact. The scientific community knows it, industry knows it, governments knowit, even the United States military knows it. The Chief of the U.S. Navy’sPacific Command, Admiral Samuel Locklear,recently said that climate change is our single greatest security threat.
My Friends, this body – perhaps more thanany other gathering in human history – now faces this difficult, but achievabletask. You can make history… or be vilified byit.
To be clear, this is not about tellingpeople to change their light bulbs or buy a hybrid car. This disaster has grown BEYOND the choicesthat individuals make. This is now about our industries, and governments aroundthe world taking decisive, large-scale action.
Now must be our moment for action.
We need to put a pricetag on carbonemissions, and eliminate government subsidiesfor oil, coal and gas companies. We need to end the free ride that industrialpolluters have been given in the name of a free-market economy, they do notdeserve our tax dollars, they deserve our scrutiny.For the economy itself will die if our eco-systems collapse.
The good news is that renewable energy isnot only achievable but good economic policy.
This is not apartisan debate; it is a human one. Clean air and a livable climate areinalienable human rights. And solving this crisis is not a question ofpolitics, it is a question of our own survival.
This is the most urgent of times, and themost urgent of messages.
Honored delegates, leaders of the world, Ipretend for a living. But you do not.
The people made their voices heard onSunday around the world and the momentum willnot stop. But now it is YOUR turn, the time to answer humankind’s greatestchallenge is now.
We beg of you to face it with courage. And honesty. Thank you.
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Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II delivers a special broadcast to the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth in relation to the coronavirus outbreak.The Queen has promised the nation that better days are ahead, during a special address on Sunday.In a rare speech, she acknowledged the grief and financial hardships Britons are facing during the coronavirus pandemic.Echoing the words of the Vera Lynn wartime song, she said that “we will meet again”.
I am speaking to you at what I know is an increasinglychallenging time. A time of disruption in the life of our country: a disruptionthat has brought grief to some, financial difficulties to many, and enormouschanges to the daily lives of us all.
I want to thank everyone on the NHS front line, aswell as care workers and those carrying out essential roles, who selflesslycontinue their day-to-day duties outside the home in support of us all.
I am sure the nation will join me in assuring you thatwhat you do is appreciated and every hour of your hard work brings us closer toa return to more normal times.
I also want to thank those of you who are staying athome, thereby helping to protect the vulnerable and sparing many families thepain already felt by those who have lost loved ones.
Together we are tackling this disease, and I want toreassure you that if we remain united and resolute, then we will overcome it.
I hope in the years to come everyone will be able totake pride in how they responded to this challenge. And those who come after uswill say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any.
That the attributes of self-discipline, of quietgood-humoured resolve and of fellow-feeling still characterise this country.The pride in who we are is not a part of our past, it defines our present andour future.
The moments when the United Kingdom has come togetherto applaud its care and essential workers will be remembered as an expressionof our national spirit; and its symbol will be the rainbows drawn by children.
Across the Commonwealth and around the world, we haveseen heart-warming stories of people coming together to help others, be itthrough delivering food parcels and medicines, checking on neighbours, orconverting businesses to help the relief effort.
And though self-isolating may at times be hard, manypeople of all faiths, and of none, are discovering that it presents anopportunity to slow down, pause and reflect, in prayer or meditation.
It reminds me of the very first broadcast I made, in1940, helped by my sister. We, as children, spoke from here at Windsor tochildren who had been evacuated from their homes and sent away for their ownsafety.
Today, once again, many will feel a painful sense ofseparation from their loved ones.
But now, as then, we know, deep down, that it is theright thing to do.
While we have faced challenges before, this one isdifferent. This time we join with all nations across the globe in a commonendeavour, using the great advances of science and our instinctive compassionto heal.
We will succeed — and that success will belong toevery one of us.
We should take comfort that while we may have morestill to endure, better days will return: we will be with our friends again; wewill be with our families again; we will meet again.
But for now, I send my thanks and warmest good wishesto you all.
