In 2008, the author of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling, was asked to give the prestigious commencement speech at Harvard University. I viewed this address again recently and was moved by Rowling’s powerful message – a message which is highly relevant today. Her presentation passionately captures the importance of two things: the ‘benefits of failure’ and the ‘crucial importance of imagination’.

Rowling speaks personally about the inevitability of failure, stating how 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 that case, she suggests, ‘you fail by default.’ Failure taught Rowling many things she could not have learned any other way. She describes this knowledge – although painfully acquired – as ‘true gift’ and says it has been worth more than any qualification she has ever achieved.

Rowling’s second point – the crucial importance of imagination – resonates powerfully. She describes the imagination as that ‘uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not’, calling it ‘the fount of all invention and innovation’.  She argues that the imagination’s most transformative and revelatory capacity is its power to ‘enable us to empathise with others whose experiences we have never shared’. This notion of empathy is particularly critical for us all today.

‘Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.’ Yet Rowling concedes that many people prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all and choose to remain comfortably within the confines of their own limited experience. She suggests that this choice to live in narrow spaces brings its own terrors. ‘I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. I think they are more often afraid.’ The most challenging remark made by Rowling posits that those who choose not to empathise with others, enable real monsters to flourish.

Rowling quotes the Greek author Plutarch, ‘What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality’. This brings me back to the importance and the power of reading. I’ll let the writer Maya Angelou capture reading’s magic: ‘When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.’

Clare Murphy

English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach