Lesson Summary and Notes: Harvard Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech - J K Rowling

J. K. Rowling, in her speech, greeted President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, pleased parents, and, above all, graduates, and then said that the weeks of fear and sickness she felt at giving the commencement address had made her lose weight, which she said had been a "win-win situation." Then, she continued, all she had to do was take deep breaths, concentrate on the red banners, and remind herself that she was at the greatest Gryffindor reunion in the world. 
J. K. Rowling expressed hope that the "gay wizard" joke would stick in people's minds, elevating her above Baroness Mary Warnock. She added that setting attainable goals was the first step towards self-improvement. In her speech, J.K. Rowling stated she had struggled to find the correct phrases to speak to them that day. In her speech, J.K. Rowling stated that she wanted to discuss the advantages of failure as well as the value of imagination and how it is sometimes referred to as "real life" on this lovely day honouring academic success. Although it might appear like an impossible or paradoxical decision, she pleaded for them to be patient. 
She also remarked how it was somewhat uncomfortable for the 42-year-old she had become to look back at her 21-year-old self at graduation. She was attempting to strike a balance between her ambition and the expectations of people close to her half a lifetime ago. J.K. Rowling claimed that she had always been certain that she wanted to be a novelist but that her parents, who were both from poor families and had not attended college, believed that her vivid imagination was just a funny peculiarity of her personality and would not help her support herself. The irony of this, she added, was now clearly evident.
J.K. Rowling stated that even though her parents had hoped she would study for a vocational degree, she preferred to study English literature. She claimed that a compromise was made that, in reality, satisfied no one and that she then moved ahead to study modern languages. She continued by stating that she dropped German and fled down the Classics corridor just as her parents' car turned the corner at the end of the road.
J.K. Rowling said in her address that she could not recall telling her parents that she was studying Classics and that they might have learned for the first time on graduation day. She said that it would have been difficult to think of any topic that was less beneficial than Greek mythology to get the keys to an executive bathroom. In her address, J.K. Rowling made it plain that she did not blame her parents for their point of view and that there was a time limit on blaming one's parents for leading one in the wrong route because, once one was old enough to drive, the duty was theirs.
J.K. Rowling said in her speech that she could not blame her parents for wanting her to never experience poverty because they had been poor and she had also experienced poverty, which was not a pleasant experience as it resulted in fear, stress, and depression as well as a myriad of minor embarrassments and hardships. She also said that while overcoming poverty was something to be proud of, poverty itself was only idealised by fools.
J.K. Rowling stated that, at the same age as her audience, she feared failure more than poverty. She continued by saying that despite spending more time at the coffee shop writing stories than attending lectures, she had a knack for passing exams, which had served as the standard of success for her and her peers.
J.K. Rowling claimed that she wasn't foolish enough to believe that the young, talented, and educated people in attendance hadn't experienced hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence have never been able to protect anyone from the whims of the Fates. She doesn't for a minute believe that everyone in this audience has lived a life of unhindered privilege and contentment. She noted that the fact that they were graduating from Harvard suggested that they were not particularly accustomed to failure and that, given how far they had come, their definition of failure was probably similar to that of success for the ordinary person.
According to J.K. Rowling, one must determine for themselves what failure looks like, but if one permits it, the world is prepared to offer the criteria. She added that she had failed by all conventional measures seven years after her graduation day, with an exceptionally short-lived marriage which had failed, leaving her jobless, a lone parent and as poor as one could be without being homeless. She continued by saying that she was the biggest failure she knew and that both her parents and her concerns for her had come true. She agreed not to tell them that failing was fun and that the time in her life had been gloomy. The light at the end of the tunnel was merely a hope, not a reality, she continued, adding she had no idea how far it went.
J. K. Rowling discussed the advantages of failure because it allowed her to concentrate on the only work that mattered to her. She continued by saying that if she had been successful in something else, she might not have had the motivation to be successful in the one field she felt she belonged. She said that although her worst fear had come true; she was still alive, still loved her daughter, still had an ancient typewriter, and still had a big idea. She then stated that she had rebuilt her life on a solid foundation after hitting rock bottom.
J. K. Rowling stated that failure is inevitable in life and that it is impossible to live without failing at something. She added that failure gave the inner security that she had never attained by passing examinations and also that she had discovered that she had a strong will and more discipline than she had suspected, as well as finding out that she had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
According to J. K. Rowling, knowing that adversity has made them wiser and stronger gives them confidence in their capacity to survive. Even though it was achieved through hard work, she claimed that this knowledge is more of a gift than a qualification. She said that if she could go back in time, she would advise her 21-year-old self that humility is the key to overcoming the challenges of life, and that genuine pleasure comes from understanding that life is not a checklist of accomplishments.
J. K. Rowling said that she selected her second topic, the value of imagination, not only because of the role it played in helping her reconstruct her life but also because she had grown to respect imagination in a far broader sense. As per her, imagination not only gave humanity the ability to imagine the impossible, which is the source of all invention and creativity, but it also offered them the capability to sympathise with others whose experiences they had never encountered.
In her address, J. K. Rowling revealed that one of her earliest day jobs, which she had taken in her early 20s to help pay the rent, had been one of her most formative experiences. This realisation inspired much of what she had later written in the Harry Potter novels, even though she had been sliding off to write tales during her lunch hours at Amnesty International's headquarters in London, she added.
In her address, J. K. Rowling remarked she has read letters quickly written and smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by individuals who would face jail to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. She also saw photographs sent to Amnesty by loved ones and friends of those who had disappeared completely. She even heard the testimonies of torture victims, saw pictures of their injuries, and read handwritten eyewitness stories of rapes, kidnappings, and summary killings.
J. K. Rowling described how many of her coworkers were ex-political prisoners, those who had been displaced from their homes or fled into exile because they spoke out against their governments. Visitors to their offices, she said, were those looking for information or to find out what had happened to those they had left behind. She also remembered a young African torture victim, no older than she was at the time, who had become mentally ill upon seeing atrocities in his homeland, and how he had trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera. She added he was a foot taller than her and looked as weak as a child, that she had been assigned guiding him back to the Underground Station, and that he had held her hand with exquisite courtesy and wished her future happiness.
In her remarks, J. K. Rowling recalls going along an empty corridor and then hearing a cry of pain and horror coming from behind a locked door. When the door opened, she said, the researcher poked her head out and told her to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting beside her, because the researcher had just had to tell him that his mother had been seized and executed in retaliation for his outspokenness against his country's regime.
J. K. Rowling stated that every day of her working week in her early twenties reminded her of how fortunate she was to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where everyone had the right to legal counsel and a public trial. She said that she had seen proof of the atrocities that humans would inflict on one another to get or keep power. This had given her nightmares about some things she had seen, heard, and read. However, she said that she had learned more about human kindness at Amnesty International than she had previously known.
In her address, J. K. Rowling claimed Amnesty organised thousands of people to take action on behalf of individuals who had been tortured or imprisoned for their views and that the strength of human empathy, leading to collective action, saving lives and releasing prisoners. She also noted how common people, whose own safety and well-being are guaranteed, band together in large numbers to save strangers and people they will never meet, and how her modest role in that process was one of the most humbling and motivating experiences of her life.
J. K. Rowling in her speech said that humans can learn and understand without having experienced, which is a power like her brand of fictional magic that is morally neutral. She also mentioned that many prefer not to exercise their imaginations, and they choose to remain in their own experiences, not paying attention to the suffering that doesn't affect them directly, and they can even refuse to know.
She said that she would resist the urge to be envious of those who live in narrow spaces since doing so might cause a particular type of mental agoraphobia, which has terrible side effects. She believed that those who lack imagination see more monsters and are often more afraid. She believed that those who lack empathy empower genuine monsters as, without trying to do so, they join with evil through their apathy.
In her address, J.K. Rowling said she had learned from the Greek author Plutarch that whatever they accomplished inside would impact the external world, which, she said, had been demonstrated a thousand times each day of our lives. She continued by telling the Harvard graduates of 2008 that because of their intelligence, capacity for hard work, education, and nationality, they had a special status and obligations. She also said that because of how they voted, lived, protested, and applied pressure on their government, this was both a privilege and a responsibility.
According to J.K. Rowling, due to their brilliance, ability for hard work, education attained and received, and membership in the world's sole surviving superpower, the Harvard graduates of 2008 are likely to have a bigger effect on other people's lives than the majority of people. She said that this gave people a special position and obligations and that it was both a privilege and a burden since it affected how they voted, lived, protested, and pressured their government outside of their boundaries. She urged the audience to stand up for those who had no voice, to connect with the weak, and to envision themselves living the lives of those without their privileges. She believed that the ability to imagine was needed to transform the world, not magic.
J.K. Rowling declared that she was almost done and that she still had hope for them, a hope she had at age 21. She continued by saying that the pals she had sat next to on graduation day were her lifelong companions and her children's godparents; they were individuals she could turn to in difficult situations and who had been gracious enough not to sue her when she used their identities as Death Eaters. She said that during their graduation, they were united by a great deal of love, the awareness that they shared a moment in time that would never happen again, and the understanding that they had specific photographic proof that would be quite valuable if any of them ran for prime minister.
J.K. Rowling wanted nothing more in her address than such friendships and expressed the hope that even if they failed to retain a single word, she said, they would remember Seneca's. She then went on to wish them all a very wonderful life before saying "thank you." She then reminded them that it wasn't how long their lives were, but how good they were that counted.