失败的好处与想象力的重要性

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of

Imagination

失败的好处和想象力的重要性

——乔安妮·罗琳2008年6月哈佛大学毕业典礼演说

风云档案

英文名：J.K. Rowling 中文名：乔安妮·凯瑟琳·罗琳 别名：JO，JK 性别：女 国籍：英国 出生地：英国格温特郡 出生日期：1965年7月31日 职业：文学儿童文学作家 毕业院校：英国埃克塞特大学 代表作品：：《哈利·波特》系列作品，《偶发空缺》 主要成就：2001年，凭哈利波特的第四部《哈利波特与火焰杯》获雨果奖；2010年，获首届安徒生文学奖；2010年荣登“100名英国最有影响力女性”的榜首；2010年被评为英国十大女富豪 家族背景：父亲Peter是一名退休的飞机制造厂Rolls-Royce的管理人员，母亲Ann是一位实验室技术人员，于1990因病去逝，终年45岁。 背景介绍

乔安妮·凯瑟琳·罗琳于2008年春被哈佛大学授予荣誉博士学位。她在哈佛大学毕业典礼上发表的演讲中阐述了失败和想象力的作用；每个人都有影响他人的能力，这是一份需要意识的责任；友谊对于逆境中的人生是重要和宝贵的。她在讲演中的幽默和智慧博得哈佛学子经久不息的掌声。仔细听后回味无穷，她的成功不是偶然的，深厚的文化底蕴，敏锐的触角，丰富的想象力，不平凡的经历，构筑了她的“魔法师”。 哈佛大学（Harvard University）是位于美国马萨诸塞州波士顿剑桥城的私立大学，常青藤盟校成员之一，被誉为美国政府的思想库，其商学院案例教学也盛名远播。1636年由马萨诸塞州殖民地立法机关立案成立，该机构在1639年3月13日以一名毕业于英格兰剑桥大学的牧师约翰·哈佛之名，命名为哈佛学院，1780年更名为哈佛大学。在世界各研究机构的排行榜中，经常名列全球大学第一位，是全世界有“全球本科生诺贝尔奖”之称的罗德奖学金得主最多的大学，历史上共有八位毕业生曾当选为美国总统。哈佛大学的教授团中总共产生了44名诺贝尔奖得主。

哈佛大学

演讲稿

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 \you.\Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve endured 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 convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindors' reunion.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I 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 I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard. You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals - the first step to self-improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, 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.These may seem quixoticorparadoxical choices, but bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came fromimpoverished 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.I know the irony strikes like with the force of a cartoon anvil now, but…, they had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched

German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executivebathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I 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, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I 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 something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I 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 I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I 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 I 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. Indeed, 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 I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I 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 I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

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 then 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. 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 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.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the priceless 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 I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I 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 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 personally 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 unique 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 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 I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during

my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.

There in my little office I 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. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I 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 who they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I 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 inflictedupon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I 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 I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I 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 I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I 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, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I 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, human beings 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.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I 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 I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I 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. It 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.

If 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.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I'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, I 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.

难词点注

nausean. 恶心；反胃；极度厌恶 squintv. 斜着眼睛看；倾向

inadvertentlyadv. 漫不经心地，疏忽地；非故意地 wizard n.（尤指故事中的）男巫；术士； thresholdn. 门槛，入口，开始 quixoticadj. 愚侠的，不切实际的

paradoxicaladj. 矛盾的；荒谬的；似非而是的 impoverishvt. 使贫穷；耗尽……的力气 executiveadj. 执行的；管理的

distinctadj. 明显的，清楚的；卓越的，不寻常的 inoculatev. 给…做预防注射

capricen. 反复无常；任性的想法；随想曲；充满幻想力的作品 conventionaladj. 传统的；依照惯例的；约定的 implodev.（使）向心聚爆

ruby n. 红宝石；红宝石色，深红色 envisionvt. 想象，预见，展望 totalitarianadj. 极权主义的 temerityn. 鲁莽，冒失

inflictv. 把……强加给，使承受，遭受

agoraphobian. 广场恐怖症，旷野恐怖症，陌生环境恐怖症

原稿译文

福斯特主席，哈佛公司和监察委员会的各位成员，各位教职员工、家长朋友们、全体毕业生们：首先请允许我向大家说一声谢谢。哈佛大学不仅给了我无上的荣耀，这段时间想到要来这里进行毕业演讲内心所经受的担心和紧张，更是令我成功减肥。这真是一个双赢的机会。现在我要做的就是深呼吸，看看前面的大红横幅，确信自己正在全球最大的魔法学院聚会上。

发表毕业演讲是肩负很大责任的。我一直都这么认为，直到我回想起当年我自己毕业时的情景。那天给我们做演讲的是英国杰出的哲学家Baroness Mary Warnock。回忆她的演讲，对我准备今天的演讲稿有很大帮助，因为我不记得她说过的任何一句话了。这个发现让我突然间觉得无畏了，不担心万一我无意中影响你们放弃商业，法律或政治这些大有前途的职业，而乐于当一个快乐的魔法师。你们看？如果数年后你们还能想起“快乐的魔法师”这个笑话，就说明我已经超越了Baroness Mary Warnock。树立可实现的目标——这是自我提高的第一步。

事实上，我曾绞尽脑汁地想今天我该和大家聊些什么。我问自己我希望在毕业典礼上了解什么？我自己在这21年光阴中又学到了什么？这听起来似乎有点不切实际或自相矛盾，但请听我慢慢讲来。

回想21岁我刚毕业时的情景，对于现在已经42岁的我来，是一个不大舒服的经历。我的前半生，一直在我自己的雄心壮志和亲人对我的期望间寻找平衡。

我一直坚信，我唯一想做的事情就是写小说。然后，我的父母都是穷苦出身，也都没有上过大学，他们一直认为我过度的想象力只是个让人贻笑大方的怪癖，完全不可能让我付按揭，获得养老金。我现在觉得讥讽就像用卡通铁砧去打击你，但??，他们希望我能读个职业学位，而我想读英国文学。最后经双方妥协达成一致，我改学现代语言学，现在回想起来，这个妥协双方都不满意。我的父母一走开，我立马放弃了德语学习而改学了古典文学。

我不记得我有告诉父母我改学古典文学了；他们也可能是在毕业典礼那天才知道的。在所有学科中，我想他们不会觉得有比希腊神话更没用的学科了，连个像样的卫生间都无法换到。

我想说明的是，我不会因为父母观点跟我不一样而去责怪他们。责怪父母给你指错方向是有一定时间限制的；当你长大到能执掌自己方向的时候，你就要自己承担责任了。更重要的是，我不能因为父母希望我不要再过苦日子而去责备他们。他们一直很穷，我也曾经贫穷，我非常理解他们，贫穷并不是什么高贵的经历。贫困会带来的恐惧，压力，甚至是绝望；它意味着屈辱和苦难。通过自己的努力摆脱贫穷，确实让人自豪，但是只有傻瓜才会觉得贫穷本身很浪漫。

当我在你们这个年龄时，最害怕的不是贫穷，而是失败。我在你们这个年龄时，在大学里明显缺乏学习动力，我花了很多时间在咖啡吧写故事，却很少去听课，我有通过考试的诀窍，使得我多年来不至于在生活中落后于我的同学。

我并不会愚蠢地认为，因为你们年轻，有才华、受过良好的教育，所以你们从来没有遭遇困难或心碎的时刻。天赋和智慧从来都是让人对命运的反复无常无所适从，我也从不认为在这里的所有人都能平静地享受自身的优越感。

然而，你们是哈佛大学毕业生这个事实就注定你们并不很了解失败。你们也许如同渴望成功一般惧怕失败。也许你们认为的失败，就跟普通人所认为的成功也差不太远，因为你们在学业上已经有很高成就了。

最终，我们所有人都必须清楚地知道什么是失败，但如果你愿意，世界是相当渴望给你一套标准的。我想说，从任何传统的标准来说，在我大学毕业七年后，我经历了一次规模空前的失败。我的婚姻闪电般地破裂了，我又失业了，成了一个单亲妈妈，过着穷困潦倒的日子，就差没有无家可归了。不光我父母对我相当担心，我对自己的未来也非常担心，从常人的眼光看，我是我所知道的最失败的人。

现在，我不打算站在这里告诉你们，失败是有趣的。那段日子是我生命中最黑暗的时光，我不知道是否像童话故事里描述的那样人都要经历磨难。也不知道这段黑暗时光要持续多久，很长一段时间里，我的前方只有希望，而没有现实。

那么为什么我要谈论失败的益处？因为失败意味着剥离掉那些不必要的东西。我不必再伪装自己，我只要做好我自己，并把所有精力放在唯一对我最重要的事情上。如果我在其他方面成功过，我可能永远不会有在我确信真正属于我的舞台上取得成功的决心。我自由了，因为已经经历过最大的恐惧，而我还活着，我仍然有一个我深爱的女儿，还有一台旧打字机和一个很大的理想。所以曾经跌入困境的谷底，成为我重建生活的坚实基础。

你们可能从来没有经历过我那么大的失败，但有些生活中的失败是不可避免的。生活不可能没有一点失败，除非你的生活非常小心翼翼，这样就等于你没有真正生活了。不管是哪种情况，失败都无法避免。

失败给了我内心的安全感，这是以前考试也没有得到过的。失败让我看清了自己，这是我通过其他方式都无法体会到的。我发现自己有坚强的意志，有比我自己想象中更强的自律；我还发现，我有一些无比珍贵的朋友。

经历过挫折，你将变得更有智慧，更坚强，你将比以往更具有生存的能力。只有通过逆境的考验你才能更清楚地认识自己，认识你的朋友。这种通过痛苦所收获的经验是真正的财富，它比我以前获得的任何资格证书都更有价值。

如果给我一个时间机器，我会告诉21岁时的自己，人的幸福在于知道生活不是一定要获得多大的成就。你的资历、你的简历，都不是你生活的全部，虽然你会遇到很多跟我差不多大或比我年纪大的人还是将两者混淆。生活是艰难的，复杂

本文来源：https://www.bwwdw.com/article/1nd7.html