j. k. rowling

• mailimi karıştırırken 2008'de harvard'daki mezuniyet töreni konuşmasını bulduğum yazar.
  o zaman pek sevgili pnut göndermiş. secimler, olasiliklar, istekler/ ne istedigini bilememeler, ya yanlis yaparsam korkulari.., demiş. aradan 5 sene geçmiş olmasına mı hala aynı kararsızlık durumunda olmama mı daha çok üzülsem bilemedim ama hepsini okumaya üşenenler için aşağıdaki kısmı ayırdım;
  yaşam koçunuz bloodyearth'ten bugünlük bu kadar, esen kalın..
  
  given a time machine or a time turner, ı 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.
  
  -----
  
  konuşmanın tamamı aşağıdaki şekilde;
  
  the fringe benefits of failure, and the ımportance of ımagination
  
  harvard university commencement address
  
  j.k. rowling
  copyright june 2008
  
  as prepared for delivery
  
  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 ı would like to say is 'thank you.' not only has harvard
  given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea ı've
  experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me
  lose weight. a win-win situation! now all ı have to do is take deep breaths,
  squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing ı am at the world's
  best-educated harry potter convention.
  
  delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so ı thought
  until ı 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 ı can't remember a single word she said. this
  liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that ı might
  inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or
  politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
  
  you see? ıf all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, ı've
  still come out ahead of baroness mary warnock. achievable goals: the first
  step towards personal improvement.
  
  actually, ı have wracked my mind and heart for what ı ought to say to you
  today. ı have asked myself what ı wish ı had known at my own graduation, and
  what important lessons ı have learned in the 21 years that has expired
  between that day and this.
  
  ı have come up with two answers. on this wonderful day when we are gathered
  together to celebrate your academic success, ı 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', ı 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 ı was at graduation, is a slightly
  uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. half my
  lifetime ago, ı was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition ı had
  for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
  
  ı was convinced that the only thing ı 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 ı would take a vocational degree; ı wanted to study
  english literature. a compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied
  nobody, and ı went up to study modern languages. hardly had my parents' car
  rounded the corner at the end of the road than ı ditched german and scuttled
  off down the classics corridor.
  
  ı cannot remember telling my parents that ı was studying classics; they
  might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. of all
  subjects on this planet, ı 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.
  
  ı would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that ı 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, ı
  cannot criticise my parents for hoping that ı would never experience
  poverty. they had been poor themselves, and ı have since been poor, and ı
  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 romanticised only by fools.
  
  what ı 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
  ı had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too
  little time at lectures, ı had a knack for passing examinations, and that,
  for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.
  
  ı 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 ı 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. ındeed, 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
  ı think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years
  after my graduation day, ı had failed on an epic scale. an exceptionally
  short-lived marriage had imploded, and ı 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 ı had had for myself, had both
  come to pass, and by every usual standard, ı was the biggest failure ı knew.
  
  now, ı am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. that
  period of my life was a dark one, and ı had no idea that there was going to
  be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution.
  ı 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 ı talk about the benefits of failure? simply because failure meant
  a stripping away of the inessential. ı stopped pretending to myself that ı
  was anything other than what ı was, and began to direct all my energy into
  finishing the only work that mattered to me. had ı really succeeded at
  anything else, ı might never have found the determination to succeed in the
  one arena ı believed ı truly belonged. ı was set free, because my greatest
  fear had already been realised, and ı was still alive, and ı still had a
  daughter whom ı adored, and ı had an old typewriter and a big idea. and so
  rock bottom became the solid foundation on which ı rebuilt my life.
  
  you might never fail on the scale ı did, but some failure in life is
  inevitable. ıt 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 ı had never attained by passing
  examinations. failure taught me things about myself that ı could have
  learned no other way. ı discovered that ı had a strong will, and more
  discipline than ı had suspected; ı also found out that ı 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 ı
  ever earned.
  
  given a time machine or a time turner, ı 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 ı 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 ı will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, ı
  have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. ımagination is
  not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and
  therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. ın its arguably most
  transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to
  empathise 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 ı subsequently wrote in those books. this
  revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. though ı was
  sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, ı paid the rent in my
  early 20s by working in the research department at amnesty ınternational's
  headquarters in london.
  
  there in my little office ı 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. ı saw photographs of
  those who had disappeared without trace, sent to amnesty by their desperate
  families and friends. ı read the testimony of torture victims and saw
  pictures of their injuries. ı 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.
  
  ı shall never forget the african torture victim, a young man no older than ı
  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 ı was, and
  seemed as fragile as a child. ı 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 ı live ı shall remember walking along an empty corridor and
  suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror
  such as ı 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 ı was reminded how incredibly
  fortunate ı 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, ı saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on
  their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. ı began to have nightmares,
  literal nightmares, about some of the things ı saw, heard and read.
  
  and yet ı also learned more about human goodness at amnesty ınternational
  than ı had ever known before.
  
  amnesty mobilises 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 sympathise.
  
  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.
  
  ı might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that ı do
  not think they have any fewer nightmares than ı do. choosing to live in
  narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its
  own terrors. ı think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. they are
  often more afraid.
  
  what is more, those who choose not to empathise 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 ı learned at the end of that classics corridor down
  which ı ventured at the age of 18, in search of something ı 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. ıt 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.
  
  ıf 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.
  
  ı am nearly finished. ı have one last hope for you, which is something that
  ı already had at 21. the friends with whom ı sat on graduation day have been
  my friends for life. they are my children's godparents, the people to whom
  ı've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind
  enough not to sue me when ı'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, ı can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. and
  tomorrow, ı hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you
  remember those of seneca, another of those old romans ı met when ı 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.
  
  ı wish you all very good lives.
  
  thank you very much.