jk羅琳2008哈佛畢業典禮演講視頻


jk羅琳2008哈佛畢業典禮演講中文稿
　　《失敗的額外收益與想象力的重要性》

作者J.K.羅琳
　　
　　浮士德主席，哈佛公司和監察委員會的各位成員，大學的員工，自豪的父母，以及所有的畢業生們：

首先我想說的是謝謝你們，這不僅因為哈佛給了我非比尋常的榮譽，而且為了這幾個禮拜以來，由於想到這次畢業典禮演說而產生的恐懼與惡心讓我減肥成功，這真是一個雙贏的局麵現在我需要做的就是一次深呼吸，眯著眼看著紅色的橫幅，然後欺騙自己，讓自己相信正在參加世界上受到最好教育群體的哈立波特大會，做畢業典禮演說是一個重大的責任，我的思緒回到了自己的那次畢業典禮，那天的演講者是一位英國的傑出哲學家 Baroness Marry Warnock. 對她演講的回憶對我寫這篇演講稿幫助巨大，因為我發現她說的話我居然一個字都沒有記祝這個發現讓我釋然，使我得以繼續寫完演講稿，我不用再擔心，那種想成為gay wizard的眩暈的愉悅，可能會誤導你們放棄在商業、法律、政治領域的大好前途， 你們看如果你們在若幹年後能記裝gay wizard這個笑話，我就比Barkoness Mary Warnock有進步了，所以設定一個可以實現的目標是個人進步的第一步， 實際上我已經絞盡腦汁、費勁心思去想今天我應該講什麽好，我問自己我希望在自己畢業那天已經知道的是什麽，而又有哪些重要的教訓是我從那天開始到現在的21年間學會的， 我想到了兩個答案，在今天這個愉快的日子，我們聚在一起慶祝你們學習上的成功時。
　　
　　我決定和你們談談失敗的收益，另外當你們如今處於現實生活的入口處時，我想向你們頌揚想象力的重要性， 我選擇的這兩個答案似乎如同歌德式幻想一樣不切實際，或者顯得荒謬，但是請容忍我講下去，對於我這樣一個已經42歲的人來說，回頭看自己21歲畢業時的情景，並不是一件舒服的事情，我的前半生之前，我一直在自己內心的追求與最親近的人對我的要求之間進行不自在的抗爭，我曾確信我自己唯一想做的事情是寫小說。
　　
　　但是我的父母都來自貧窮的家庭，都沒有上過大學，他們認為我的異常活躍的想象力隻是滑稽的個人怪癖，並不能用來付抵押房產，或者確保得到退休金， 他們希望我再去讀個專業學位，而我想去攻讀英國文學，最後達成了一個雙方都不甚滿意的妥協我改學外語，可是等到父母一走開，我立刻報名學習古典文學，我忘了自己是怎麽把學古典文學的事情告訴父母的了，他們也可能是在我畢業那天才第一次發現。
　　
　　在這個星球上的所有科目中，我想他們很難再發現一門比希臘神學更沒用的課程了， 我想順帶著說明，我並沒有因為他們的觀點而抱怨他們，現在已經不是抱怨父母引導自己走錯方向的時候了，如今的你們已經足夠大來決定自己前進的路程，責任要靠自己承擔，而且我也不能批評我的父母，他們是希望我能擺脫貧窮，他們以前遭受了貧窮。
　　
　　我也曾經貧窮過，對於他們認為貧窮並不高尚的觀點我也堅決同意，貧窮會引起恐懼、壓力，有時候甚至是沮喪，這意味著小心眼、卑微和很多艱難困苦，通過自己的努力擺脫貧窮確實是件很值得自豪的事情，但隻有傻瓜才對貧窮本身誇誇其談，我在你們這個年齡的時候，最害怕的不是貧窮，而是失敗 在你們這個年齡，盡管我明顯缺少在大學學習的動力，我花了很多時間在咖啡吧寫故事。
　　
　　很少去聽課，但是我知道通過考試的技巧，當然這也是好多年來評價我，以及我同齡人是否成功的標準， 我想說並不是我太遲鈍，我覺得你們還不曾知道什麽是艱難困苦，或者什麽是心碎的感覺，因為你們還年輕，而且天資聰明，受到良好教育，但是天賦和智商還未能使任何人免於命運無常的折磨，我從來不認為這裏的每個人已經享有平靜的恩典和滿足。
　　
　　然而你們能從哈佛畢業這個現實表明，你們對失敗還不是很熟悉，對於失敗的恐懼與對於成功的渴望可能對你們有相同的驅動力，確實你們對於失敗的概念可能與普通人的成功差不了太多，你們在學習這方麵已經站得相當高了當然，最終我們所有人不得不為自己決定什麽是失敗的組成元素，但是如果你願意的話，世界很願意給你一堆的標準。
　　
　　基於任何一種傳統標準，我可以說僅僅在我畢業7年後，我經曆了一次巨大的失敗，我突然間結束了一段短暫的婚姻，失去了工作，作為一個單身媽媽，而且在這個現代化的英國，除了不是無家可歸，你可以說我有多窮就有多窮，我父母對於我的擔心，以及我對自己的擔心都成了現實，從任何一個通常的標準來看，這是我知道的最大失敗，現在我不會站在這裏和你們說失敗很好玩，我生命的那段時間非常的灰暗，那時我還不知道我的書會被新聞界認為是神話故事的革命，我也不知道這段灰暗的日子要持續多久，那時候的很長一段時間裏，任何出現的光芒隻是希望而不是現實，那麽我為什麽還要談論失敗的收益呢？僅僅是因為失敗意味著和非我的脫離，失敗後我找到了自我，不再裝成另外的形象，我開始把我所有的精力僅僅放在我關心的工作上，如果我在其他方麵成功過，我可能就不會具備要求在自己領域內獲得成功的決心，我變得自在，因為我已經經曆過最大的恐懼，而且我還活著，我有一個值得我自豪的女兒，我有一個陳舊的打字機和很不錯的寫作靈感，我在失敗堆積而成的硬石般的基礎上開始重築我的人生，你們可能不會經曆像我那麽大的失敗，但生活中麵臨失敗是不可避免的，永遠不失敗是不可能，除非你活得過於謹慎，這樣倒還不如根本就沒有在世上生活過，因為你從一開始就失敗了。
　　
　　失敗給了我內心的安寧，這種安寧是順利通過測驗考試獲得不了的，失敗讓我認識自己，這些是沒法從其他地方學到的，我發現自己有堅強的意誌，而且自我控製能力比自己猜想的還要強，我也發現自己擁有比紅寶石更真的朋友，從挫折中獲得的知識越充滿智慧、越有力，你在以後的生存中則越安全，除非遭受磨難，你們不會真正認識自己，也沒法知道你們之間關係有多鐵，這些知識才是真正的禮物。
　　
　　他們比我曾經獲得的任何資格證書更為珍貴，因為這些是我經曆過痛苦後才獲得的， 如果給我一個時間機器，我會告訴21歲的自己，個人的幸福建立在自己能夠認識到生活不是擁有的物品與成就的清單，雖然你們會碰到很多和你們一樣大或年長的人分不清楚生活與清單的區別，但你們的資格證書、簡曆，都不能等價於你們的生活，生活是困難的，也是複雜的，它完全超出任何人的控製，謙虛的認識到這些能使你們在生命的沉浮中得以順利生存，你們可能認為我選擇想象力作為第二個演講主題是因為它在重築我人生的過程中起了作用。
　　
　　但這不是全部原因，雖然我會不遺餘力地為床邊故事的價值做辯護，但我已學會從更廣泛的意義來評價想象力的價值，想象力不僅是一種能促使人類預想不存在事物的獨特能力，從而成為所有發明和創新的源泉，從想象力或許是最具改革性和啟示作用的能力這點講，它更是一種能使我們同沒有分享過他們經曆的人產生共鳴的力量，我最偉大的生活經曆之一發生在寫《哈利波特》前，當然我在後來書中寫的很多東西與這個經曆有關，這個啟示來源於我最早期工作之一，我在倫敦的國際特赦組織總部的研究部門工作。
　　
　　雖然我在中飯的時間逃出來寫小說，但我需要這份工作來支付我20多歲時的房租，(注國際特赦組織是一個全球性的誌願組織，致力於為釋放由於信仰而被監禁的人以及給他們的家庭發放救濟等方麵的工作，) 在那兒我的狹小的工作室內，我匆忙得讀著從各地集權政權內傳出來的潦草信件，這些信件是那些冒著進監獄風險而向外傳播發生在他們身上慘劇的人偷運出來，我看到了無影無蹤就消失的人的相片，這些相片是家裏人或朋友送來的，我讀著被酷刑折磨的受害者的證據和他們受傷的照片，我打開手寫的，目擊者對審訊和處決的摘要記錄。
　　
　　以及對綁架和強奸的敘述， 我的許多同事以前是政治犯人，他們因為勇於不附和政府而獨立思考，以致被趕出自己的家，或者被放逐，來拜訪我們辦公室的人包括那些傳遞消息的，或者嚐試弄清楚那些被迫離開的人身後的真相，我永遠不會忘記那個非洲來的被酷刑折磨的受害者，他是一個和我那時候年齡相仿的年輕男子，但在他家鄉經受過的拷打後，他已經有了精神玻當他向錄像機講述強加在他身上的暴行時，他無法控製地發抖。
　　
　　他比我高一英尺，但像一個小孩一樣脆弱，後來我的工作是護送他去地下站，這個整個生活被野蠻摧毀的男子禮貌地握著我的手，祝福我一生幸福，隻要我活著，我就能記住我沿著一個空曠的走廊走，突然從後麵關閉的一扇門傳來我從沒聽到過的充滿痛苦和恐怖的尖叫，門打開了有個研究人員探出頭，讓我快點跑去弄點熱飲料給坐在她旁邊的那個年輕男子。
　　
　　原來她剛告訴那個男子，為了報複他對他國家的政權做了公開的反對演講，他的媽媽被抓注處決了， 在我20多歲時工作的每一天，我提醒我自己我是多麽的幸運啊，能生活在一個民主選舉產生的政府的國家，在這裏合法的陳述和公共審判是每一個人的權利，每一天我看到更多的證據，證明邪惡的人類為了獲得、維持權利而加害與他們同樣的人類，我開始為這些我看到的、聽到的、讀到的東西做惡夢，是文字惡夢， 然而我也在國際特赦組織學到了比我以前知道的更多的人類善良的一麵，國際特赦組織動員了數千位沒有因為信仰問題而被拷問或入獄的人，讓他們來代表那些經曆過這些的人行動起來，人類的同理心具有能引導集體行動的力量，這種力量能拯救生命，讓囚徒獲得自由，在這種活動中，那些擁有受到保護的個人福址和安全的普通人聚在了一起，來拯救他們不認識、也永遠不會見麵的人，我在這個過程中小小的參與是我生命中最卑微，也是最令人振奮的經曆之一，人類和在這個星球上的其他生物不同，人類能夠在沒有自我經曆的情況下學習和理解，他們可以設身處地的思他人所思，想他人所想， 當然這是一種力量，如同我虛構的魔法，這種力量是道德中立的，有人可能常運用這種能力去操作和控製，就像用於理解和同情一樣，而且許多人根本不喜歡訓練他們的想象力，他們寧願在自己的經驗範圍內維持舒適的狀態，也不願麻煩地去思考這樣的問題如果他們不是現在的自己。
　　
　　那麽應該是什麽感覺呢？他們拒絕聽到尖叫，拒絕關注囚牢，他們可以對任何與他們自身無關的苦難關上思維與心靈的大門，他們可以拒絕知道這些， 我可能會羨慕那些以這種方式生活的人，但我不認為他們的噩夢比我少，選擇在狹小的空間生活會導致精神上的恐曠症，而且會帶來它自身形成的恐怖，我想那些任性固執的缺乏想象力的人會看到更多的怪物，他們常常更容易感到害怕，甚至於那些選擇不去想他人所想的人可能激活真正的惡魔，因為雖然我們沒有親手犯下那些昭然若揭的惡。
　　
　　我們卻以冷漠的方式和邪惡在串謀， 我在那個經典走廊(harry potter書內的一個地點？)的末端學到的，也是我18歲時在那冒險搜尋但不知道怎麽定義的重要事情之一就是，如古希臘作家普盧塔克所寫的我們對內在修養的追求將會改變外在現實，這是一個令人驚訝的說法，然而它在我們生命中每一天會被證明一千多次，這句話部分地說明了我們和外部世界不可分離的聯係，我們隻能通過生命存在來接觸別人生命的事實， 但是你們2008哈佛大學的畢業生們，到底有多麽得願意來感受他人的生命呢？你們對付困難工作的智慧與能力，你們贏得和接受的教育，給了你們獨特的地位和責任。
　　
　　甚至你們的國籍也使你們與眾不同，你們中的很大一部分人屬於這個世界剩下的唯一超級大國，你們投票、生活、抗議的方式，你們給政府施加的壓力，會產生超越國界的影響，那是你們的特權，更是你們的負擔，如果你們選擇用你們的地位和影響力來為沒法發出聲音的人說話，如果你們選擇不僅認同有權的強勢群體，也認同無權的弱勢群體。
　　
　　如果你們保留你們的能力，用來想象那些沒有你們這些優勢的人的現實生活，那麽不僅是你們的家庭為你們的存在而感到自豪，為你們慶祝，而且那些因為你們的幫助而生活得更好的數以千萬計的人，會一起來為你們祝賀，我們不需要魔法來改變世界，我們已經在我們的內心擁有了足夠的力量那就是把世界想象成更好的力量，在我的演說快要結束的時候，我對大家還有最後一個希望，這是我在自己21歲時就明白的道理。
　　
　　畢業那天和我坐在一起的朋友後來成了我終生的朋友，他們是我孩子的教父母，他們是我碰到麻煩時能求助的人，他們是非常友善的，不會為了我在死亡複活節那天用他們名字而控告我的朋友，在我們畢業的時候，我們沉浸在巨大的情感衝擊中，我們沉浸於這段永不能重現的共同時光內，當然如果我們中的某個人將來成為國家首相，我們也沉浸於能擁有極其有價值的相片作為證據的興奮中，所以今天我最希望你們能擁有同樣的友情。
　　
　　到了明天我希望即使你們不記得我說過的任何一個字，但能記住塞內加，我在逃離那個走廊，回想進步的階梯，尋找古人智慧時碰到的另一個古羅馬哲學家，說過的一句話生活如同小說，要緊的不是它有多長，而在於它有多好，我祝願你們都有幸福的生活， 謝謝大家。
　　
jk羅琳2008哈佛畢業典禮演講英文原稿 　　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.