spokenness against his country’s
regime, his mother had been seized
and executed.
POWER
Every day of my working week in
my early twenties, I was reminded
how incredibly fortunate I was to
live in a country with a democrat-
ically elected government, where le-
gal representation and a public tri-
al were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence of
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 mobilizes thousands of people
who have never been tortured or im-
prisoned for their beliefs to act on be-
half of those who have. The power of
human empathy leading to collective ac-
tion saves lives and frees prisoners. Ordi-
nary people, whose personal well-being
and security are assured, join togeth-
er 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.
They
can
think
themselves
into
other
people’s
places
Unlike any other creature on
and understand without having
experienced. They can think them-
selves 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
sympathize.
They
can
refuse
to
know
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 willfully
unimaginative see more monsters. They
are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose
not to empathize 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,
of eighteen in search of something
I could not then define, was this,
written by the Greek author Plu-
tarch: “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 bur-
den.
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 advan-
tages, then it will not only be your
proud families who celebrate your
existence but thousands and millions
of people whose reality you have
helped change. We do not need
magic to transform our world; we
ourselves already: we have the power
to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one
last hope for you, which is some-
thing that I already had at twenty-
one. 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 real trouble, people who
have been kind enough not to sue
me when I took 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.
I wish
you all
very
good
lives
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 Sen-
eca, another of those old Romans I
met when I fled down the Classics
corridor in retreat from career lad-
ders, 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.