J.K. Rowling at Harvard

I will confess to never having read a single Harry Potter book, but I still have a lot of admiration for J.K. Rowling, who has done more to get people reading than just about anyone in recent memory. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, she gave the commencement address at Harvard, and it's a pretty good one. You can read it all here. I'll paste a couple of my favorite parts below.

1) "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."

2) "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."

You think Harvard graduates would be thrilled that they managed to get such a cool speaker. Not so fast. Check out this NPR story about some graduates' reactions. What a bunch of pompous jerks (I'm talking about the complainers here, who think they deserved a "real" speaker). Can't wait for you to hit the real world, kids, and see how that treats you.