J.K. Rowling · ハーバード卒業式スピーチ

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. 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. I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. By every usual standard, I had failed. I had hit rock bottom. And 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. Half my lifetime ago, I set out with one goal: to finish the book that was burning inside me. Failure stripped away the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was. I came to terms with failure and began to draw on my imagination, on the one quality I valued above all others. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, but it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared. Its foundation is rooted in our common humanity. We do not need magic to change the world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already.