For my diversity class at American University we needed to somehow go out and expand our knowledge of diversity, a fairly vague assignment, and then present our experience to the class. I figured that this was a great opportunity to try and get to know my students a bit better by experiencing a Christian religion (since over 90% of my students are some form of Christian). Therefore, in the name of expanding my knowledge of diversity, on Sunday evening I entered a church to see a service for the first time in my life (I attended a baptism once when I was pretty young, and I entered churches in Europe when we were visiting but that has been about it).
Because I know absolutely nothing about Christianity (aside from what I learned from Jesus Christ Superstar –thanks Andrew Lloyd Webber!) I tried to look up a church that might be considered traditionally black. I couldn’t find out whether the churches were specifically black churches, and due to a bit of laziness, I didn’t feel like calling specific churches to find out when their services were, so I only looked at churches that had websites that I could find. The church I found I was hoping would be primarily African American (mainly just because my kids are 99% African American), but I failed miserably on that front – despite the SE location of the church, it turned out to be very white with a small number of Asians and a few black people.
Now the funny part, that clearly highlights my ignorance of all things New Testament, is that I picked a Baptist church to visit. Now I had no idea that Baptists were Evangelicals (a.k.a: the enemy), so I was thoroughly unprepared for what I encountered. I attended an evening ceremony (which I found out was ‘very different’ from the regular 3 hour affair that they have in the mornings). It was very organized: the pastor would say a name of someone in the congregation and they would head to the front of the church to tell everyone about something they wanted the congregation to pray for. The pastor already had the back-story so he often asked pointed questions to get them to say everything they wanted to and then the people would say what they wanted the congregation to pray for. During this the pastor would also say a name of a congregant and say something like “Jonah, would you lead the prayer for Kate?” and they would be in charge at the end of saying the prayer. During this time some people were avidly taking notes, filling entire pages w/their notes on what to pray for for everyone who presented.
Now it was during this time that I began to figure out that this was an Evangelical organization, and by figure out I mean that it was thrown in my face and then bludgeoned me to death. Up until this point there had been a few songs (not very good, but not very crazy either, just a lot of Jesus is lord type stuff) and then a few community announcements, it all seemed very friendly and very normal. Then the stories began…
The first story was about a family who had a newborn baby (3 months or something) and started out by asking the congregation to pray for their wisdom, strength, patience, their child, etc. This seemed pretty normal to me (by super-religious standards of course). But then they began talking about how they had just moved to a neighborhood where people were very nice and open and they had great ‘conversations.’ Then they began talking about one of the neighbors specifically who they had talked to a few times and they wanted everyone to pray for her to ‘open her heart.’ Now this sounds semi-benign, though clearly what was not said explicitly by this family was ‘open her heart to Jesus.’ Then other stories began and they basically got more and more extreme, with many people openly asking people to ‘pray for conversions.’
Some stories of note:
A British man was visiting and he talked about how god had stopped the evil British government from passing a law that would ‘restrict religious freedom under the guise of protecting aberrant lifestyles’ (a.k.a. homosexuality)
A man was at George Washington University to give a 5-6 minute presentation on their religion (amongst other Christian organizations) and he asked them (via email) to pray for ‘mass conversions’
A bunch of trips to Southeast Asia where they had to be ‘vague’ on the details of what cities and what exactly they were doing aside from handing out pamphlets
A man who had organized an ‘interfaith’ luncheon with a Muslim group where apparently the idea was to try and convert the Muslim groups (although it sort of seemed like he may have just meant to increase understanding and tolerance, which would be a good thing – though later it was interpreted very directly as converting them).
A man who has started an American football team in Southeast Asia with the intent of using that team to convert the children to the Baptist faith
Then after quite a while we finally get to the prayer part. Everyone bowed their heads, closed their eyes, and the individuals who had been singled out would get the microphone and say a prayer about the story (meaning I basically had to listen to all the stories twice).
Now on the whole I was very calm and respectful, although I was texting a few friends in order to keep my sanity (my friend Joe accurately said it was good I went by myself, because if I had had a friend there we would’ve been laughing our asses off). But there were 2 times where I lost my respectful demeanor.
The first time was when the woman sitting next to me (luckily there was a small pole between us so we were still a few feet apart) led one of the prayers (the one for the guy speaking at the GW campus). She was one of the more ‘passionate’ prayer leaders to give a prayer that night, and she went off on how she prayed that the other ‘fake’ religions would not be heard, ‘hundreds of converts,’ and then she went off on something about the devil and students. I basically erupted into silent laughter that I simply could not contain. Luckily everyone had their eyes closed and heads bowed, so they didn’t notice (as was proven when she shook my hand at the end of the evening and asked where I was from, etc.). Now the main reason I was laughing is that in some ways she was basically talking about me, or at least what she would think I was, and she was using a wide variety of religious adjectives.
The other prayer I silently laughed at was the one about converting the Muslim group over luncheon. I mean how unrealistic can these people get? Converting religious Muslims who regularly pray? Yeah… very likely
In the end, over 80% of the stories/prayers had to do with converting people, and only a small number had to do with personal lives of the families (like sickness, jobs, troubling times, etc). Now I consider myself to be (as Joe has instructed me to say) someone who has an ‘unlocked mind’ in the sense that I am willing to listen to people but will then use my own judgment to decide what to think (this is instead of an open mind where you blindly accept different things people say and think). I’m generally OK with people believing in whatever religion they want to believe in, BUT I am absolutely not ok in ANY WAY with trying to convert other people. And I’m not OK with religions that so clearly promote intolerance.
My mom made an excellent point afterwards that it is very easy to see how these people and their beliefs so easily translate into the need for Evangelicalism. They believe so fully in Jesus, and heaven (and the rules that get you there), and that these are good things, that it is an incredibly easy leap to needing to try and ‘spread the word’ and educate/convert people so that they too can experience these joys. But the fact that Evangelicalism has long been used as a tool for the Right as a form of social control and power grabbing that I simply cannot accept the outlooks of these religions. I have friends who are in far more liberal churches that do not try and convert everyone they see, who do not promote hate and intolerance as a matter of doctrine, that I think Evangelicalism has to go. It is based in ignorance and blind faith, and this is not something that should be promoted to the world at large. If I were remotely religious in any way I would pray that they fail at everything they attempt to do. And since I’m not, all I can hope for is that as we improve the education system, we get people to question what these churches are telling them and help people open their eyes.
To make matters worse, I had my short presentation on all of this today and was very calm and collected and basically just said that I went and did this, but I left frustrated and disappointed. The teacher then asked why I was disappointed and I said that I wasn't big on the fact that they were praying for conversions. Then someone raised their hand and basically said (I kid you not a TEACHER said) "well what's wrong w/that? They mean it as a good thing" Now I decided to hold my tongue, since this was a fight that clearly nobody was going to 'win' but then another teacher said "it's like being a teacher, you have something you want to teach people" and my brain was like... wait... it is SO NOT THE SAME. There is a difference between preaching a religion and teaching history, I'm sorry. And there is a big problem with people believing other people are going to hell and therefore need to be saved. It is incredibly insulting. Anyways I figure that the guy who said that comment was thinking that I was being flip or rude in my presentation, which I really wasn't trying to do at all, so he was probably being a bit reactionary. At the same time he clearly believed what he was saying.
The moral of the story: I can't hang out with Evangelicals they scare the pants off of me...
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
P.S.
I also have the best dog in the world, he lets me know when he has to go and needs access to a proper place to do it, and he's only 3 months old! What a good dog. Now if we could only get him to stop waking up at 6:30 a.m....
On another note, I got an interview at one of the best public schools in D.C. It was very unexpected and very exciting and I will know yes or no by the end of next week *hopefully*. (They'll call me and inform me if yes, and if no they may or may not call me... so we shall see)
On another note, I got an interview at one of the best public schools in D.C. It was very unexpected and very exciting and I will know yes or no by the end of next week *hopefully*. (They'll call me and inform me if yes, and if no they may or may not call me... so we shall see)
HOLY MOTHER OF ALL THINGS HOLY
Dark Knight is....... AMAZING. So amazing it boggles the mind. The end. I saw it at midnight and it was well well well worth it.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Pan Pictures and Movies!
I have gotten many requests for more puppy pictures. I have finally taken some more and uploaded the ones I already had and have posted them on my parent's website. You can find them here: Pan Pictures
There are also some videos:
1. Pan attacking Mike
2. Pan playing fetch (for the most part). Careful this film kinda shakes a lot
3. Pan playing w/his favorite toy, a stick, and even a little bark!
There are also some videos:
1. Pan attacking Mike
2. Pan playing fetch (for the most part). Careful this film kinda shakes a lot
3. Pan playing w/his favorite toy, a stick, and even a little bark!
Monday, June 9, 2008
A great day to be alive...
...or not.
It is going to be a high of 97 today (w/a 'feels like' of 102) and humidity is at 20% (or more)
Unfortunately it is MUCH HOTTER in my classroom right now. There is no air (unlike other classrooms in the building), only 2 windows open, and my room faces East so we have been getting sun blasted at us ALL DAY. (in this case East is way worse than West facing windows because we leave so early in the day)
We have 1 fan, which is good because otherwise we would have to evacuate this place, and all the shades are down. But god damn is it awful up here. I wouldn't begrudge the kids if they never return, I wouldn't fucking come if it is like this, this is technically illegal, we are supposed to have A/C or they literally are supposed to close the building. But since some rooms have A/C they probably won't be doing that. Oh well, enough bitching. I've gotten a lot of stuff put away, maybe later I'll bring it out to the car, like during 3rd/4th period.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
J.K. Rowling's Commencement Speech @ Harvard
This speech is really beautiful (and fairly long, so you don't have to read it) I just wanted to post it here more for myself so I can see it from time to time.
"The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination" by J.K. Rowling
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 honor, 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 criticize 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 romanticized 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 realized, 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 empathize 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 mobilizes 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 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 can lead 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 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.
Copyright of J.K. Rowling, June 2008
2008 Harvard University Commencement, June 5, 2008.
"The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination" by J.K. Rowling
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 honor, 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 criticize 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 romanticized 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 realized, 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 empathize 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 mobilizes 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 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 can lead 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 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.
Copyright of J.K. Rowling, June 2008
2008 Harvard University Commencement, June 5, 2008.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
(Pan)demonium
Pan playing around. My gosh he is so cute! He went on his first walk today (3/4 of a block x 2) and he did a great job! He followed me and barely whined at all. So slowly but surely he is learning. Today was also his first long stint alone 10:30 - 4:30. He did well, when I got back there were no messes and I wasn't able to hear him in the hallway. That being said, I don't think he drank all that much because he was a bit nervous. But when I got home I fed him and gave him more water, so he was OK.
Otherwise class is going well, with only 1.5 weeks left we are seriously winding down, but attendance has not dwindled like the kids promised :D so that is good. Also they are beginning to turn in their assignments! Also good. Only 4th period is having a hard time, and my guess is it is the last period of the day and there aren't that many of them, so sometimes it is hard for them to get up the energy to keep goin.
Oh and Pan is officially a great name. Mike in particular has thought of many other great nicknames:
- Pandemonium (Mike)
- Pandemic (Mike)
- Panty Raid (Mike) and
- Panopticon (Mine)
are my favorites
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