Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination (2 page)

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 out-

side world of what was happening

to them. I saw photographs of

those who had disappeared without

a 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 coworkers

were ex–political prisoners,

people who had been dis-

placed from their homes or

fled into exile because they

had the temerity to speak

against their governments.

Visitors to our offices in-

cluded those who had come

to give information, or to

try to find out what had

happened to those they had

left 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 back to the

Underground station afterward, 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 had to give him the news

that, in retaliation for his own out-

spokenness against his country’s

regime, his mother had been seized

and executed.

Every day of my working week in

my early twenties, I was reminded

how incredibly fortunate I was to

live in a country with a democrat-

ically elected government, where le-

gal representation and a public tri-

al were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence of

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 mobilizes thousands of people

who have never been tortured or im-

prisoned for their beliefs to act on be-

half of those who have. The power of

human empathy leading to collective ac-

tion saves lives and frees prisoners. Ordi-

nary people, whose personal well-being

and security are assured, join togeth-

er 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, human beings can learn

and understand without having

experienced. They can think them-

selves 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

sympathize.

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 leads to a form

of mental agoraphobia, and that brings

its own terrors. I think the willfully

unimaginative see more monsters. They

are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose

not to empathize 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 eighteen in search of something

I could not then define, was this,

written by the Greek author Plu-

tarch: “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 bur-

den.

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 advan-

tages, then it will not only be your

proud families who celebrate your

existence but thousands and millions

of people whose reality you have

helped change. We do not need

magic to transform our 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 some-

thing that I already had at twenty-

one. 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 real trouble, people who

have been kind enough not to sue

me when I took 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 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 Sen-

eca, another of those old Romans I

met when I fled down the Classics

corridor in retreat from career lad-

ders, 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.

About the Author

J.K. Rowling is the author of the best-

selling Harry Potter series of seven

books, published between 1997 and

2007, which have sold over 450

million copies worldwide, are distri-

buted in more than 200 territories, are

translated into 78 languages, and have

been turned into eight blockbuster

films. Her first novel for adult readers,

The Casual Vacancy
, was published in

September 2012 and her first two

crime novels, written under the

pseudonym Robert Galbraith, were

published in 2013 and 2014 respec-

tively.

As well as receiving an OBE for

services to children’s literature, J.K.

Rowling supports a number of causes

through her charitable trust, Volant.

She is also the founder and president

of the children’s charity Lumos, which

works to end the institutionalization

of children globally and ensure all

children grow up in a safe and caring

environment.

I founded Lumos to help end the incredibly

damaging practice of institutionalization. As

many as eight million children are currently

being raised in institutions worldwide.

The overwhelming majority are not

orphans. A wealth of expert opinion agrees

that institutionalization is extremely damaging

to children’s mental and physical health and

has a dire effect on their life outcomes.

It is my dream that within our lifetime the

very idea of institutionalizing children will

seem to belong to a cruel fictional world.

—J.K. Rowling,
Founder and President of Lumos

wearelumos.org