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你们可能不会经历像我那么大的溃败，但生活中的失败是不可避免的。生活永远都一帆风顺是不可能的，除非你活得谨小慎微，那就好比根本没有活过——要是那样的话，你照样失败。 
  
　　实际上，我绞尽脑汁、挖空心思去想今天我该对你们说些什么。我问自己，我希望在自己毕业时学到些什么，还有毕业后至今的21年里我又吸取了哪些重要的教训。

　　我想到了两个答案。在今天这个美好的日子，我们欢聚一堂，庆祝你们学业有成，我想和你们谈谈失败的好处。你们将要步入有时候所谓的“现实生活”，所以我还想强调一下想象力的重要性。

　　这两个答案似乎天马行空、不切实际，还有些自相矛盾，但是请听我慢慢道来。

　　对于我这样一个已经42岁的人来说，回想自己21岁毕业时的情景，是一件不怎么舒服的事情。21年前，我在个人的追求与亲人的期望之间，艰难地谋求平衡。

　　我当时确信我惟一想做的事情就是写小说。但是，我的父母出身贫寒，都没有上过大学。他们认为，我的想象力过于丰富，是一种怪癖，根本不能用来挣养老金或还房贷。

    他们希望我读个职业学位，而我想攻读英国文学。最后，我们达成了一个现在看来双方都不甚满意的妥协：我改学现代语言学。可是，我没过多久就扔掉了德语，恣意徜徉在古典文学的长廊中。

　　我不记得是否告诉父母自己改学了古典文学，他们可能是在我毕业那天才发现的。在这个星球上所有的学科中，我想他们很难说出一门比希腊神话学更没用的课程了，它根本无法让你成为公司高管和享用独立的卫生间。

　　这里我要顺便申明，虽然想法不同，但我并不责怪父母。你们不能一直责怪父母给你指错了路；当你达到了可以自己掌舵的年龄，你就要承担起责任。而且，我的父母只是希望我不要过穷日子，这无可厚非。他们自己很穷，我后来也很穷，所以我很理解他们，贫穷不是什么好事情。贫穷带来恐惧、压力，有时还让人抑郁，贫穷意味着许许多多的羞辱和艰辛。靠自己的努力摆脱贫穷，确实值得自豪，只有傻瓜才会觉得贫穷很浪漫。

　　当我在你们这个年纪时，我最害怕的不是贫困，而是失败。在你们这个年龄，我在大学明显缺少学习的动力，很多时间都泡在咖啡吧写故事，很少去听课，尽管如此，我却知道通过考试的窍门。

　　我没有要老生常谈，不是说你们年轻、才华横溢、受过良好教育，就不懂得艰难和心碎。天赋和智慧并不会使任何人逃脱命运的反复无常。我也绝对没有说，在座的每一位都享受过风平浪静、优越舒适的生活。

　　但是，你们毕业于哈佛的事实，注定你们并不是很了解失败。你们可能非常害怕失败，就如同你们极其渴望成功。而且，你们所谓的失败，很可能和普通人眼中的成功差不多，因为你们已经取得了很高的学术成就。

　　最终，我们要自己决定什么是失败，不过只要你愿意，这个世界会给你设定一系列标准。我可以这么说，按照任何传统的标准，我毕业后只过了7年，就输得一塌糊涂。短命的婚姻闪电般地破裂，我成了一个单身母亲，还丢了工作。除了还有地方住，在当代英国，我要多穷就有多穷。父母对我的担忧和我对自己的担忧都成了现实。用任何平常人的标准，我都是自己所知道的最失败的人。

　　现在，我并没有准备来这里告诉你们失败很有趣。那段日子是我生命中的黑暗岁月。当时，我根本看不到尽头，也看不到此后媒体所称的童话般美好的结局。我不知道还要在黑暗中走多久，很长一段时间内，黑暗尽头的任何一丝光亮都只是希望，而不是现实。

　　那么，为什么我还要说失败是有好处的？很简单，因为失败意味着狠心抛弃那些无关紧要的东西。我不用再伪装自己，从而回归了真实的本我，我将自己所有的精力，倾注到对我最重要的一项工作中。要是我以前在其他领域有点成绩，我也许永远都不会有这样大的决心，要去这个我坚信真正属于我的领域打出一片天空。我自由了，因为我最大的恐惧已经成为了现实，但我依然活着，依然有一个深爱的女儿，还有一台旧打字机和一个大大的梦想。我生命中的低谷，就此变成了我重建生活的坚实基础。

　　你们可能不会经历像我那么大的溃败，但生活中的失败是不可避免的。生活永远都一帆风顺是不可能的，除非你活得谨小慎微，那就好比根本没有活过——要是那样的话，你照样失败。

　　失败给了我一种内在的安全感，以前通过再多考试也没有的安全感。失败让我看清自己，以前我从没认识到自己是这样的。我发现，我意志坚定、严于律己，比我自己以为的还强。我还发现，我有一些好朋友，比宝石还珍贵。

　　经历挫折之后，会变得更加智慧、强大，当你认识到这一点，就意味着你掌握了生存的能力。不经过逆境的考验，你永远不会真正了解你自己，不会体会到亲友的力量。这种领悟才是真正的财富，虽然来之不易，但是它比我获得的任何证书都有用。

　　如果我有一个时光机，让时光倒流，我会告诉21岁的自己，个人的幸福是基于自己能够认识到：生活不是计算财富与成就。你们的证书、简历，并不等于你们的生活的全部，不过你们会碰到很多我这个年纪或更年长的人将这两者混淆。生活是艰难的，也是复杂的，不以任何人的意志为转移，只有认识到这一点，你们才能战胜人生的无常。

　　你们可能觉得，我选择想象力作为第二个主题是因为它在我重塑人生的过程中起了重要作用，确实如此，但不是全部。虽然我会不遗余力地强调睡前讲故事的价值，但我已学会从更广义的层面上来认知想象力的价值。想象力不仅是一种超越现实的形象思维，是所有发明和创新的源泉，想象力更能使人焕然一新，灵感勃发。在这个意义上，想象力更是一种让我们与有着不同于自己经历的人产生共鸣的力量。

　　塑造我自己最重要的生活经历之一发生在我写《哈利 · 波特》之前，我在后来的书中写到的很多内容都与这段经历有关。这个启示来源于我最早期白天的工作之一。那时我才二十出头，在伦敦的大赦国际（请见[译者注]）总部的研究部门工作，虽然我在午饭时间溜出来写小说，但这份工作让我有钱来付房租。

　　在狭小的办公室里，我匆忙地读着从集权政体偷偷传出的潦草信件，寄信人有男有女，他们冒着坐牢的风险向外界诉说他们的遭遇。我看到了突然失踪者的照片，这些照片是绝望的家人和朋友寄来的。我看到了受到严刑逼供的受害者的证词和他们受伤的照片。我看到了目击者回忆即决审判和处决、绑架和强奸的手写记录。

　　我的许多同事以前是政治犯，被赶出家园或流放。我们办公室要接待不少来访者，有些是来说明情况的，有些是来打听那些他们当时被迫遗弃的人的消息。

　　我永远不会忘记那个非洲人，一个饱受拷打的受害者，他当时很年轻，和我年龄相仿，但他在家乡遭受拷打后，便患上了精神病。当他面对摄像机讲述强加在他身上的暴行时，他不由自主地全身发抖。他比我高一英尺，但却像一个小孩一样脆弱。之后，我送他去地铁站，这个生活饱受蹂躏的男子彬彬有礼地握着我的手，祝福我一生幸福。

　　每一天，我都看到许多证据显示人类残忍地加害于他们的同类，以获取或维持权力。我开始做恶梦，纯粹的恶梦，梦中都是一些我的所见、所闻和所读。

　　不过，我也在大赦国际看到了前所不知的人性的善良。

　　大赦国际能随时动员数千位从未因信仰问题被严刑拷打或入狱的人，让他们去为有过此般经历的人服务。人类的移情作用具有强大的力量，能引发集体行动，拯救生命，使囚徒重获新生。那些生活安定、无后顾之忧的普通人聚到了一起，众志成城，去拯救他们不认识、永远不会见面的人。在此过程中我的工作微不足道，却是我最为感恩，也是最令人振奋的人生经历之一。

　　人类和这个星球上的其他生物不同，人类能够在没有经历的情况下学习和理解。他们可以设身处地想他人所想。当然，这种力量就如同我小说里的魔法，是道德中立的。有人会以此去玩弄或控制他人，有人以此去理解和同情他人。

　　许多人根本不喜欢锻炼他们的想象力。他们宁愿在自己的经验范围内维持舒适的状态，也懒得去思考这样的问题：如果他们不是现在的自己，会是怎样的感觉？他们可以拒绝听到尖叫，拒绝关注囚牢；他们可以关上思想和心灵的大门，无视任何与自身无关的苦难；他们可以拒绝去了解。

　　我可能会羡慕以这种方式生活的人，但我不认为他们的恶梦会比我少。选择在狭小的空间生活会导致一种精神上的恐旷症，那会带来它自身形成的恐怖。我觉得那些故意选择缺乏想象力的人会看到更多的怪物，他们往往更加害怕。

　　而且，那些选择不去为他人着想的人可能会激活真正的恶魔。因为，虽然我们没有亲手犯下昭然若揭的罪行，我们却因自己的冷漠和邪恶串通一气。

　　18岁时，我义无反顾地踏上探索古典文学的道路，去追求当时无法确知的事物。最终，我学到了很多东西，其中之一就是希腊作家Plutarch的这句话：我们在内心的所得，将改变外界的现实。

　　这是一个令人惊讶的说法，然而，我们生命中的每一天都无数次证明它的正确。这句话部分地说明了我们和外部世界密不可分，我们只要活着，就能触动别人的生命。

　　但是，各位哈佛大学2008届毕业生，你们能在多大程度上触动他人的生活？你们的智慧、你们的能力、你们所受的教育，给了你们独一无二的优势，也给了你们独一无二的责任。就连你们的国籍也使你们与众不同，你们中的绝大多数属于世界上仅有的超级强国。你们投票、生活、抗议的方式，你们对政府施加的压力，会产生超越国界的影响。那是你们的特权，也是你们的负担。

　　如果你们选择用你们的地位和影响来为没法说话的人说话；如果你们选择不仅认同有权有势者，也认同无权无势者；如果你们保留你们的能力，用来想象那些条件不如你们的人们是如何生活的，那么不仅你们自豪的家庭会为你们的存在庆祝，那些因为你们的帮助而生活得更好的数以千万计的人，也会一起为你们祝贺。我们不需要魔法来改变世界，我们已经在内心拥有了足够的力量，可以用想象力去创造一个更美好的世界。

　　我的演讲快结束了。我对你们还有一个最后的祝愿，我在21岁时就已经实现了。毕业那天和我坐在一起的朋友成了我一生的朋友。他们是我孩子的教父母，是我碰到困难时能求助的人，是非常友善，不会为了我以他们的名字给食死徒（《哈利·波特》中的反面角色）命名而控告我的人。在我们毕业的时候，我们紧紧相拥，因为我们之间坚不可摧的友谊，因为共同经历的那段无法重来的时光。当然，还因为，我们知道，如果我们中的某个人日后成为首相，那么我们手中的照片就会身价飞涨。

　　所以，今天，我最希望你们能拥有的就是像我毕业时那样的友谊。明天，我希望就算你们记不起我说过的任何一个字，但能记住塞内加的话，他是我当时放弃职业生涯，踏上那条经典文学道路，探寻远古的智慧时碰到的另一个古罗马人：生活如同小说，重要的不在于活得多长，而在于过得多好。

　　[译者注]Amnesty International大赦国际，1961年5月28日在伦敦成立。其宗旨是动员公众舆论，促使国际机构保障人权宣言中提出的言论和宗教自由，致力于为释放由于信仰而被监禁的人以及给他们的家庭发放救济等方面的工作。每年召开一次理事会会议，其资金来源于个人捐款、会费和当地筹款。

 

英文版

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

Harvard University Commencement Address

J.K. Rowling

Copyright June 2008

As prepared for delivery

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.

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