The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination - J K Rowling

 The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination

J K Rowling

"The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination" is J K Rowling’s deeply affecting, celebrated 2008 Harvard commencement speech, published in book form. In her speech, J.K. Rowling asks the profound and provocative questions: How can we embrace failure? And how can we use our imagination to better both ourselves and others? Drawing from stories of her own post-graduate years, she addresses some of life’s most important issues with acuity and emotional force.

J K Rowling is well known as the author of “Harry Potter”. In 2008, she gave a powerful commencement address at Harvard University. In her speech, titled "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination," she shared her own experiences of failure and how they led her to success. She also emphasized the importance of imagination in overcoming challenges and creating a better future.

Rowling begins her speech in a humourous mode. She speaks of the fear she had at the thought of giving the commencement address. Now she will imagine that she is at the world's largest Gryffindor reunion. This thought will help her to be at ease. Rowling thinks of the commencement address at her own graduation. She can’t remember a single word of that. So she is happy that the Harvard graduates also won’t remember anything of what she says.

J K Rowling wishes to speak on two ideas: the benefits of failure, and the importance of imagination. These two points may seem to be quixotic or paradoxical choices. As Rowling goes on in her speech, we understand that the two subjects are helpful to the new graduates. They are equipped to understand and face failures. They also will begin to think of others who are suffering, and act on their behalf.

She thinks of her parents who wanted her to take a vocational degree. But her interest was to write novels. Her parents viewed this as an amusing personal quirk as it will not help her make money. As a compromise, Rowling enrolled to study Modern Languages. But soon she shifted to the study of Classics.

From her experience, Rowling wishes to speak about the benefits of failure. She and her parents have suffered poverty. But her fear was not about poverty but about failure. After her graduation, Rowling faced failure. Her marriage failed, she was jobless and was a lone parent. That period of her life was dark. Rowling sees failure as something that helps to strip away the inessential. She stopped pretending that she was anything other than what she was. Failure also gives an inner security. It teaches things about oneself that could be learned no other way. Failure helped Rowling to recognize real friends.

The second point Rowling takes up in her speech is about the importance of imagination. Imagination is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have not shared. Rowling thinks about her experience while working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London. She was exposed to letters and photos about people persecuted by totalitarian regimes. Many of her co-workers were ex-political prisoners who were displaced from their homes. The stories of the evils caused by people gave her nightmares. At Anmesty, Rowling felt the human empathy of people to act for the persecuted. This empathy comes from imagination, that helps us sense something we have not experienced.

There are people who may not want to exercise their imagination and understand the pain of others. Tjeu can close their minds to suffering. But Rowling feels that they are often more afraid. She quotes Plutarch and says, what we achieve inwardly will change outward reality.

Rowling advises the Harvard graduates of 2008 to touch others’ lives. If they could imagine themselves into the lives of others, many people will be helped. We do not need magic to change the world. We have the power to imagine better. As Americans with the right to vote and also protest, they have a great impact. That is their privilege and burden.

Rowling is proud of her friends with whom she sat on graduation day. They have been her friends for life, and have helped her in many ways.

Rowling concludes her address by quoting Seneca, a Classic scholar: As is a tale, so is life; not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.


Prepared by

Jacob Eapen Kunnath

Associate Professor, Dept. of English

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I See Kashmir From New Delhi at Midnight

Image
  I See Kashmir From New Delhi at Midnight Agha Shahid Ali The Poet Agha Shahid Ali was born in 1949: just one year or more after Independence, and also after partition. His birth was in Delhi, but he was raised up in Kashmir. Life in Kashmir was difficult in those days. The problems of partition, with India and Pakistan holding claim to the territories there, made the place a constant field of fights and tensions. The poet moved over to the USA in 1976. This poem forms part of a collection “The Country without a Post Office”. which came out in 1997. Agha Shahid Ali is a representative of diaspora. He has childhood memories of Kashmir. He spent his youthhood partly in Delhi, where he had his college education. Then he moved over to the United States of America, where he became a teacher and emerged as a noted poet. In most of his poems, Kashmir and its problems form the theme. The Poem “I See Kashmir From New Delhi at Midnight”, by Agha Shahid Ali, is a diasporic poem, where the po...
Read more

Romeo and Juliet (Savouring the Classics)

Image
Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) The Writer Shakespeare needs little introduction! A writer of plays - tragedies, comedies, and histories, and also the composer of poems and sonnets. He lived in Elizabethan England, in the sixteenth century. But he belongs not to any particular place or time. As his friend and contemporary writer Ben Jonson puts it: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” A Shakespearean drama, according to the Elizabethan convention, is divided into five Acts. Each Act may have a number of scenes. The Elizabethan stage had no curtains in the front. Hence, the writers arranged each section in a way all characters left the stage at the end of a scene. Even if there is a dead body, there will be someone to carry it away. Because there is no back curtain depicting any scenery or background, the plays will have lots of descriptions explaining what all can be seen. The Play “Romeo and Juliet” is one of the early plays from Shakespeare. The plot is develo...
Read more

THE BOY WHO PAINTED CHRIST BLACK

Image
  John Henrik Clarke: John Henrik Clarke was an African-American historian, professor, and a pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and Africana studies. Being a member of a sharecropper’s family, he was expected to become a farmer by his mother. But he followed his dreams and went to Harlem. There he pursued scholarship and became part of the Black Power Movement, which aimed at instilling confidence of the Black people and at their upliftment. He was one of the pioneers who founded the Black Academy of Arts and Letters. Major Works: Novel - Confessions of a Nat Turner Short stories –             The Boy Who Painted Christ Black: A Short Story             On the Other Side: A Story of the Color Line             Leader of the Mob: A Story of the Color Line        ...
Read more