圖片節錄至大愛網路電台
「失敗的好處」
http://vimeo.com/1711302
我想讓它更簡單化，我不會責怪他們的看法。畢業典禮也是一個停止責怪父母操控你或把你帶到錯的方向的時間點。這個時間，你已經夠成熟可以成為你人生的駕駛人，也意味著你有更多的責任。最重要的是，我不能批評一對不希望子女像他們一樣窮困辛苦的父母。他們已經貧困很久了，所以我也跟著貧困，因些我可以理解他們的心情一「貧困不是個高尚的經驗」。貧困必需承擔恐懼、壓力及一些沮喪。它意味著成千上萬的小恥辱及艱苦。靠自己的力量脫離貧困，讓確實是一件讓自己引以為豪的事，但是認為貧窮是傳奇(浪漫)的只有傻子。
然而，在我跟你們一樣年紀的時候，我怕的不是貧困，而是失敗。
我在你們的年紀，儘管在大學中缺少衝勁。我花了很多時間在咖啡店寫故事，花了太少時間在文學上。我有小聰明讓我通過考試。多年來這一直是我人生中及朋友中這己變成衡量成功的成法。
我不會笨到去認為你們這些年輕、有才華和受過非常良好的教育的人從來沒體驗過艱困或著悲傷失望。才華和聰明的人並不能逃離命運的安排。我也不認為這裡的任何一個人享有不可破壞的特權與滿足。
然而，事實就是你從哈佛畢業了。但這不表示你也從了解「失敗」這件事畢業了。你可能害怕失敗的程度就如同你渴望成功一樣。事實上，你對於「失敗」認識可能跟一般人對於成功的定義一樣，理論上你們的學業已經讓你們在高處了。
最終，我們都要自己來決定是什麼造成所謂的失敗，如果你願意，這個世界非常會迫不及待於給你一整套的標準。所以我認為不論用什麼方法來定義，在畢業後僅僅七年，我確實徹徹底底的失敗了。異常短暫的婚姻結束了，我也失業了。一個摩登英國女性既孤單，又窮到可以，雖然不至於無家可歸。但這一切都是我父母最怕發生的狀況，也是我最怕發生的事。依照任何標準，我都知道我是個非常失敗的人。
現在，我要站在這裡不是要告訴你失敗很有趣。在那段期間是我人生中的黑暗時期，我甚致沒想到那時候發生的事情會成為今天神話般決心的代表。我當時不知道這條黑暗的隧道何時才會走到盡頭。在遠端那些光線也只是渺茫希望並非實際的隱定生活。
所以為什麼我要跟你們談論失敗的好處？簡單來說，失敗也意思謂除去那些不重要的東西。我不再裝做其它人而重新做回自己。並開始全心全意我唯一在意的工作上。我以前可能在某方面很成功，但我沒有在我認為的寫作的歸屬地真正下定決心成功過。那時的我感到心是自由的，因為我已經跌落谷底，再也不怕有更大的困難。更何況我還活著啊！我還有我最心肝寶貝的女兒，還有一台老舊的打字機和一個非常棒的創意。這片堅硬的谷底成為我重建人生的堅固基礎。
你可能不會像我如此的失敗，但是在人生中，一些失敗是無法避免的。沒有失敗是不可能的，除非你活得小心翼翼的就好像你從來沒生活一樣。不管在哪個情況下，你都是要失败的-「因為什麼都沒有過而失敗」。
失敗給我一種內心的安全感，不是那種通過考試可以比擬的。失敗教導了我許多關於自己的事，這些都是用其它方法不可能得到的。我發現我有堅石般的意志及比以往更能自律。我也發現我擁有比寶石還珍貴朋友們。
因為挫折你變得更有智慧，更強壯。也意味著你有強韌的生存能力。要不是生活經過逆境的考驗，否則你永遠不會真正地了解自己，也不會發現堅定的友誼關係。這是上天送你最寶貴的禮物，我是吃了不少苦才得到的，但這卻比我之前得到任何證照還值得。
如果給我時光機或轉換器，我希望告訴21歲的我：「人生不是一張收獲或成就的勾選清單。」你的資格證照、你的經歷並不等於你的人生。盡管你會遇到很多像我一樣年紀或著比我老的人，他們都分不太清楚這兩者的差別。人生非常難以定義非常錯綜複雜，事情的發展往往不在我們的設想掌控之車。保持謙遜會讓你安穩地經過人生的驚濤駭浪。
你可能認為我之所以把想像力當做我的第二主題，是因為它在重建我的人生扮演很重要的角色。但不全然是這樣的子。盡管我到最死都會撼衛床邊故事的價值。但我還學到在要更寬廣的範圍中重視想像力。想像力不只是人類預想未來的能力，更是創意和創新的泉源。它具有多樣變化性及啟示性。讓我們宛如身歷其境，即使我們從沒有真正這樣做過。
影響我最深的經驗是發生我在寫哈利波特前，對於我完成那些書有很大的幫助。在我很早之前的一份全職工作，我都會利用午餐空檔時寫作。20歲時，我在倫敦的Amnesty國際總部的研究部門工作，並以薪水來支付我的房租。
在我小小的辨公室，我會讀到一些因為倉促寫下潦草字蹟的信件。這些是從極權專政的地區走私出來的。寫這些信的人通常是處於危險情況或監禁的男人/女人。他們寫這些信的目的是想要讓外面的世界知道真相。我看著那些失去音訊的人的照片，由他們的朋友或父母寄到這的。我讀著被嚴刑烤打的犯人寫出的供詞，也看到他們受傷的嚴重程度。我打開手寫稿，上頭記錄著目擊證人的供詞，記載著綁架及強姦的記錄及執行。
我的多數同事是以前是政治犯，因為他們想脫離政府的極權統制，所以他們被強迫離開家園或逃離後流亡。那些來公司的訪客，除了提供訊息給我們之外，他們也非常想知道他們離開後，以往的伙伴發生什麼事。
我永遠無法忘記一個來自非洲曾受嚴刑烤打的受害者，他當時也比我大不了多少。但在祖國受殘害的他卻顯得精神有些異常。當他在鏡頭前描述那些殘暴的酷刑，他無法克制，不停的擅抖害怕。他才高我一點點而己，卻脆弱的就像一個孩子一樣。那時我因為工作的關係，必需陪他在地下鐵搭車，而這個飽受摧殘並震盪人生的男孩，竟然帶著優雅的言詞舉動祝我有個快樂的未來。
在我有生之年我都會記得一件事，就是有一次我走在一條空盪盪的長廊中，在後方關閉的門，傳出一陣痛苦恐怖的嘶吼，之後我再也沒聽過像那次如此悲悽的聲音。然後那扇門被打開，一位工作人員伸出頭來，叫我快去拿一杯熱飲給她旁邊那位年輕人。她說她剛剛告訴年輕人，因為他對政府的直言不誨，政府為了報復，抓了他的母親並處以死行。
在20多歲每一天工作，我都被提醒著我是多麼幸運啊！我住在一個任何人都自由選舉，有合法人民代表和公平審判的國家
每天我都看到邪惡的人類為了得到權力或維持權力而加害其它人類同胞。於是我開始做惡夢，那些關於我所看到的所聽到的，如此確切實際的惡夢。
同樣在Amnesty國際部門，我也體會之前從未認識的人性善良。
國際組織特赦了幾千人，他們從未因為嚴刑烤打或監禁而失去信仰。人類同理心的力量，集結大家去實值做愛心，去拯救生命、去解放失去自由的人，而那些平凡但財富生活都有保障的人，集結起來去幫助他們不認識或著一輩子都會認識的人。在這小小的參與過程中，是我一生中最卑微但是也最鼓舞的體驗。
不像地球上的其它生物，人類不用實際去體驗，就可以學習和理解。他們可以以同理心去設想其它人的想法，去想像自己正處於別人的處境。
當然，這是一種力量，就像我小說中虛構的魔法，是種道德中立的力量。有人可以熟練或輕易運用這種能力，有點雷同去理解、同情。
還是很多人不願去發揮他們的想像力。他們選擇安於自我良好之中，只願待在自己熟悉的經驗裡。他們從不去想如果他們生來下是別人的話，會是怎麼樣子的。他們可以拒絕聽到尖叫，也可以不去看樓子裡的狀況。他們可以關閉心靈不去聽見任何不是自已遭遇的痛苦。他們拒絕知道。
我忍不住要忌妒那些人可以這樣過生活，除了我不認為他們做的惡夢會比我少。居住在一個狹窄的空間可能導致心理害怕陌生環境的症狀，它帶來恐懼本身。我認為那些自己決定不去想像的人會看到更多的怪物。他們通常會更害怕。
另外，那些選擇沒有同理心的可能會產生真正的怪物。就算沒有實值做邪惡的事，因為我們沒有同理心，所以怪物仍然我們同在，
當我18時尋找一些我無法定義的東西，我踏上了古典文學之道。在這條道路的盡頭，我學到非常多。其中就一句希臘作者寫的：「我內心之所得，形外之改變。」
這句驚人的陳述已經在我們生活中無數次的被證明。它在某種程度上說出，我們無法脫離跟外在世界的連結。事實上，要跟別人產生關連性最簡單的方法就是「存在」。
2008年哈佛畢業生們，你們涉入別人又有多深呢？即使國藉將你們分開區別，你們同樣是那種對於困難工作游刃有餘的人，也是得到最高的學歷那一群，也是擁有特別的社會階層及獨特的責任的精英份子。們中的大多數都屬於這個世界目前僅存的超級大國。你投票的方式、你生活的形式、你抗議的方式，你帶給政府的壓力。都會帶來鉅大的影響力，遠遠超出你自身想像。這就是你自的權利！你們的重擔！
如果你能利用你的地位和影響力為那些不能發聲的人站出來吶喊；如果你決定不僅認同有權力的群體，更與弱勢群體為伍；如果你重拾想像力去體會那些沒有像你一樣優勢的人的心情。那麼你的存在不但讓你家人感到驕傲，你那些幫助過成千上萬生活貧乏的人也會為你慶祝。我們不需要用魔法改變世界，我們可以用已經就存在的內心力量。我們可以有更好的想像力量。
到此，幾乎要到演講的終點了。最後我對你們有一個期盼。這樣東西在我21歲就有了。當時坐在一起的同學們已經變成我終生的摰友。他們也是我孩子的教父教母。當我陷入困境時，他們對我如此寬厚。就算我以他們名字來命名催狂魔時也沒有控訴我。在畢業典禮時，因為深刻的感情所致，因為曾共渡那些不會重返的時光，我們的感情緊緊的被彼此相連，當然的，如果哪天我們其中一個成為首相，那麼我們合照必定價值菲淺。
所以今天，我能給你們最好的祝福就是像這樣的友誼。然後明天，你如果記不起我講的任何一個字也沒關係。但我希望你記住下面一句話。那是我從事業名利中撤退轉而尋找古老智慧時，在古典文學的長廊上遇見了古羅馬作者Seneca。
「人生如故事，無關長短，只乎是否精采！」
我祝福你們有很美好的生活，非常謝謝你們的聆聽。
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 ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced 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 fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention.
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 towards personal 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 might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please 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 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 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 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 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 indeed 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 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 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 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 uniquely 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 they had been forced to leave 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 inflicted upon 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,
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