President Faust, members of the
Harvard Corporation and the
Board of Overseers, members of
the faculty, proud parents, and,
above all, graduates.
thank
you
The first thing I would like to
say is “thank you.” Not only has
Harvard given me an extraordi-
nary honor, but the weeks of
fear and nausea I have endured
at the thought of giving this com-
mencement address have made
me lose weight. A win-win sit-
uation! 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
Gryffindor 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, the 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 come out ahead of Baro-
ness Mary Warnock. Achievable
goals: the first step to self-
improvement.
Actually, I have racked my mind
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 twenty-one years that have
expired between that day and this.
The
Importance
of
IMAgiNATiON
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.
UNEASY
BALANCE
These may seem quixotic or paradox-
ical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the twenty-one-year-
old that I was at graduation is a slightly
uncomfortable experience for the forty-
two-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.
personal
quirk
I was convinced that the only
thing I wanted to do, ever, was 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 would
never pay a mortgage or secure a
pension. I know that the irony strikes
with the force of a cartoon anvil
now.
So they 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 executive
bathroom.
I would like to make it clear,
in parenthesis, that I do not
blame my parents for their
point of view. There is an
expiration 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 criticize 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 humil-
iations and hardships. Climb-
own efforts—that is something
on which to pride yourself,
but poverty itself is roman-
ticized 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, gift-
ed, and well-educated, you have
never known hardship or heartache.
Talent and intelligence never yet
inoculated anyone against the ca-
price of the Fates, and I do not for
a moment suppose that everyone
here has enjoyed an existence of un-
ruffled privilege and contentment.
So
high
have
you
already
flown
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 removed from the average
person’s idea of success, so high
have you already flown.
I was the