“Magic Mum”at Harvard University
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.
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 to.
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 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.
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.