Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008
來源出處：
http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/06/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination
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 have endured 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 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 Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self 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 have 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 may 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 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 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.
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 that 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 then 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 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 the price of 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 than any qualification I ever earned.
So given 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.
Now 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 personally 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 at the African 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 speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left 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 back 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 had to give 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, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves 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 sympathise.
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 wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise 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 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.
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 burden.
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 advantages, 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 change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. 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 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.
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 Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, 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.
中文的翻譯出處來源：http://foolsdock.blogspot.tw/2008/06/jkrowling-2008.html
PS：如原作者有任何版權疑慮，請告知，將刪除，感謝!!
Faust校長，哈佛校委會的主席、成員們，教授們，為子女驕傲的父母們，還有，所有的畢業生們，
首先我要說的是，謝謝你們。不僅是因為哈佛給了我如此高的榮譽，還因為，在得知我將要給出這份畢業致辭的幾個星期內，憂心忡忡，食不下咽，減了肥。真是個雙贏局面！現在，我所要做的，就是，深呼吸，緊盯著紅紅的飄帶，然后自欺欺人，相信我身處于全世界受到最好教育的哈利波特大會上。
給一個畢業致辭是一個巨大的責任，我幾乎是這么認為的，直到我開始回想我的畢業典禮。我的畢業典禮上，受邀做出致辭的是英國著名的哲學家 Mary Warnock 女爵。回憶她的演講，給寫我自己的演講稿，幫了大忙，因為，我根本不記得任何她說過的話了。這個“解放”了我的發現，促成了我完成了演講稿，不再擔心，我可能無意之中，影響到你們：傻傻地樂著，想成為一個很炫的巫師，放棄商業、法律、政治上的大好前程，
你看，如果多少年后，你們所能想到的是這個“很炫的巫師”的笑話，我還是要比 Mary Warnock 女爵強點。可以實現的目標：邁向提升的第一步。
事實上，為了今天要說什么，我絞盡腦汁。我問自己，我畢業那天，我希望我了解什么，還有我畢業后的這21年里，我得到了哪些重要的經驗教訓。
我想出了兩個答案。在今天，如此美好的一天，我們聚集一堂，慶祝你們學業上的成功，（其一，）我要跟你們說說失敗給我們帶來的好處；你們正站在一個“真實人生”的入口處，（其二，）我想要突出強調想像力的重要。
這聽起來有些脫離實際，或者相互抵觸，但是，請先忍一忍。
回頭看我畢業后的這21年，對我這個已經42歲的人而言，是個不太自在的體驗。在我目前走過的一半的生命旅程之前，我一直在我自己的愿望和最親的人對我的期盼之間，奮力地尋求平衡。
我一直非常清楚自己唯一想做的事情，就是寫小說。然而，我的父母，自小貧困，從沒有上過大學，他們認為我那些過度的想象力是一個滑稽的怪習慣，這個習慣，不能用來付房貸，也不能保住一份養老金。
他們希望我念一個實用的學位；我希望讀英語文學。后來妥協的結果——回過頭來看這個妥協，其實誰也不滿意——是，學外語（Modern Language，一般是對外國語言的統稱）。父母離開的汽車還沒有轉過街角，我就把德語專業換成了古典文學專業。
我忘了我是否曾經告訴過我的父母我念了古典文學（Classics，主要是學習古希臘、古羅馬的文學，藝術，歷史，語言等），他們可能直到參加我畢業典禮的那一天才第一次知道。在這個星球上所有的科目里，我想，在憧憬擁有一間豪華浴室的時候，他們是很難找到一個科目比希臘神話更沒用的了。
我要說明的是，打括號，我不因為父母的觀點而責怪他們。有一天，等你成人了，自己可以決定事情了，需要承擔責任了，那個時候，你就不再怨他們總是要違背你的意愿，把你領錯路了。而且，我的父母希望我永遠不要過上窮日子，我無法因為這個而批評他們。他們自己窮，我也窮過，和他們一樣，我也認為，這不是一個有尊嚴的體驗。貧窮帶來恐懼不安，帶來壓力，有時候還會帶來抑郁。貧窮意味著上千個小的屈辱、不幸。通過自己的努力擺脫貧困，是非常值得驕傲的事情，但是，只有傻子才會把貧窮浪漫化。
我在你們這個年紀時，最害怕的不是貧窮，而是失敗。
像你們這么大時，在大學里，雖然我非常缺乏動力去學習，花了太多的時間泡在咖啡館里寫小說，用了太少的時間在課堂上，我對考試很在行，而這個，在很長的時間里，對我和我同學而言，都是衡量成功與否的標準。
我還沒糊涂到認為你們因為年輕，聰明、受過好的教育，就從不知道艱難或苦痛。天賦和能力還從沒有讓任何人豁免于命運之神的掌控，而且我也從不認為在座的各位，享受過波瀾不驚的特權，和永遠的知足常樂。
但是，你們是從哈佛的校門走出去這個事實，卻顯示了，你們不是那么了解失敗。驅使你們前行的，對失敗的恐懼和對成功的熱望，大概差不多。事實上，你們對于失敗的理解可能和一般人對于成功的概念離得不太遠。學業上，你們的起點已經很高了。
最終，我們都得明白，失敗是些什么，這個世界，總是迫不及待地要給你一套標準，如果你讓它那么做的話。所以我想，合理地說，用任何常規的標準來衡量，大學畢業后的7年，我非常失敗。一個非常短命的婚姻，失業，單身母親，在現如今的英國，找不到比我更窮的了，除了流浪漢。我父母對我的憂心，我對自己的憂心，都得面對，按任何一個通常的標準來看，我是我所知道的最大的失敗。
現在，我站在這里，不是要告訴你們，失敗很好玩。那段時間，在我的生命里，是黑的，我怎么也不會想到，有一天，我的故事會成為報紙上的一則童話。在那段黑暗的地道里，我根本不知道，哪里才是盡頭，很長的一段時間里，任何一點盡頭的亮光，都只是希望，而非現實。
那么為什么我要來談失敗帶來的好處呢？很簡單，因為失敗帶走了一切非本質的東西。我不再裝作一個不是我自己的我，我開始集中精力，全力以赴，去完成我覺得唯一的重要的事情。如果我在其他方面有所成功，我大概永遠不會有那個決心、毅力在我自認為自己所歸屬的領域有所建樹。我被“解放”了，因為最擔心的事情都已經發生了，我還活著，還有個我愛的女兒，還有臺老的打印機，還有個了不起的想法。我跌倒谷底，堅硬的巖石上，我重建人生。
你們可能永遠不會有我這么巨大的失敗，但是，生命中，有些挫折、失敗不可避免。活著，就不可能沒失敗過什么，除非，你極度謹慎，那樣你可能就不算活過——如果是這樣，你已經缺省的算失敗了。
失敗給了我內在的安全感，這個是考試給不了的。失敗讓我認識到自己，這個，我從其他任何地方也學不到。我發現了我有很強的意志力，發現了超出我自己原以為的自控力，還發現我的朋友，真的比紅寶石還珍貴。
回首看你的失敗，你得到的那些更睿智、更強烈的經驗、想法，永遠會跟著你，扎根于你的求生能力之中。你將永遠不能真正了解自己，了解你和周圍人之間關系的力量，除非你都體驗過，在一種不幸的境遇之下。這些認知，真是禮物，因為，這些都是痛過所獲，對我來說，這比任何我拿過的文憑都要來得有價值。
給我一個時間機器或者時光隧道，我會告訴21歲的自己，個人的快樂不是建筑在資產或成就的清單上。你的文憑、簡歷，不是你的人生，雖然你可能遇到很多像我這般年紀或者更老一點的人，搞不清楚這兩者的差別。人生很難，很復雜，不受任何人的掌控，謙卑地認識到這個，會讓你在多變的逆境中挺過來。
你們可能認為我選擇第二個主題，想象力的重要性，緣于它在我重建自己人生的過程中占據的位置，但，不全是這樣。盡管我會為睡覺前的講故事時間辯護直到我咽氣，我意識到珍視想象力是基于一個更廣泛的層面。想象力不僅是人類獨具的能力，“看見”那些并不存在的，以及繼而產生的所有的發明、創造；在它可被證明的最據變化性和揭示性的能力之中，想象力給了我們設身處地去為同類著想的能力，我們沒有經歷他們所經歷的，但我們可以理解、同情他們。
寫哈利波特之前，我有過一些很了不起、對我產生非常重要影響的經歷，而這，也催生了小說中的一些內容。這來自于我早年的工作。當時20歲出頭，雖然一到午飯時間，我就溜出去寫小說，我還是要工作付房租的，工作的地方在 Amnesty International （國際特赦組織）倫敦指揮所的研究部門。
在那間小辦公室里，我匆匆看過一些潦草的信件，這些信件是從極權國家通過非正常管道運送出來，運送的人擔著牢獄之災的風險，為了把事情的真相告訴給外面的世界。我看過那些突然就失蹤了的人的照片，這些照片由他們絕望的親人、朋友傳到我們手中。我看過遭受迫害的人的證詞，和他們身體上傷痕的照片。我看過手寫的，有目擊者的，關于綁架和強奸案的審判、處刑的記錄。
我的很多工作同仁都曾是政治犯，因為他們有勇氣、膽量，有自己的想法，不受政府擺布，他們被迫離開自己的家園，被驅逐，或逃離。去我們那兒的，有去傳遞消息的，還有去探聽自己仍在那個國家的親友的狀況的。
我永遠無法忘記那個受迫害的非洲小伙子，當時，他不比我年長，在他的祖國，經受各種磨難后，他已經精神異常。在攝像機面前講述他所遭受的酷刑時，他止不住地發抖。他當時比我高一英尺，可是虛弱得像個小孩。之后，我被指派送他去地鐵站，這個人生已經完全被殘酷蹂躪的小伙子，極優雅地握住我的手，祝福我未來快樂。
只要我還活著，我就記得，那天，走在空蕩蕩的廊道里，突然聽見，從一扇緊閉的門里面，發出的一聲尖叫，那個叫聲中充滿了痛苦和恐懼，我從來沒聽過那樣的叫聲。門開了，一個同事露出頭來，叫我快點拿一杯熱飲過去給坐在她旁邊的年輕人。同事剛剛不得已告知那個年輕人，他的國家，為了報復他在外公開發表反對言論，把他的母親給處決了。
在我20幾歲工作時的每一天，我都被提醒著，我是多么的幸運，生長在一個民主自由，民選政府的國家，有律師、得到公開審判是每個人的權利。
每一天，我看到更多的邪惡的人，為了權利，迫害他們自己同胞的證據。我開始作噩夢，字面意義上的噩夢，夢見那些我看過的，聽過的，讀過的。
不過，在國際特赦組織，我也看到了超過我以前見識過的人類的高尚面。
國際特赦組織里成千上萬的人，自己并沒有經歷過因為信仰被折磨、坐牢，卻在為那些受迫害的人發聲。人類同理心的力量，引導著群體活動，去拯救生命，去救出坐牢的人。普通人，他們自己有安全、受保障的生活，聚在一起，形成一個集體的力量，去拯救那些他們從不知道的人，可能永遠也不會碰上的人。我在那個活動中小小的加入，是我這一生中最謙卑、最受到激勵的體驗之一。
在這個星球上，有別于其他生物，我們人類可以不需要去切身經歷，就能學習并且理解。我們可以設身處地，去思人所思，想人所想。
當然，這只是種能力，像我小說中虛構的魔法一樣，道德上，它是中立的。有人也可以用這種能力，去操弄、控制，就和用它去理解和同情一樣。
許多人情愿完全放棄發揮他們的想象力。他們選擇把自己保持在有所體驗的界限內，永遠不要找麻煩，去感受如果換成別人是什么樣子的體驗。他們可以拒絕聽到尖叫聲，或者只是在門里面偷看；他們可以對不在身邊的災難充耳不聞，視而不見；他們可以拒絕知道。
我可能也有點忍不住要去嫉妒那些人可以那樣活著，除了說，我不認為，他們的噩夢會比我的少。選擇生活在一個狹隘的空間，會導致一種精神病：agoraphobia（懼曠癥：對人群及開放空間感到恐懼，和另外一個 claustrophobia（幽閉恐懼癥：對狹小密閉空間感到恐懼）正好相反），而這個，會帶著它本身的恐懼。我想，那些頑固欠缺想象力的人會見到更多的魔鬼。他們通常更容易害怕。
此外，那些選擇不去同情別人的人可能促成了魔鬼的產生，他們沒有直接犯罪，但是卻因為冷漠而成為幫兇。
18歲那年，我在古典文學的廊道里穿梭到盡頭，為了尋找一些我當時不能概括的東西時，學到一句，出自于古羅馬時代的希臘作家 Plutarch（普魯塔克）：我們內在所獲得的將會改變外在的世界。
這是一句令人驚詫的斷言，然而在我們生命中的每一天，它都被驗證過千百回。它告訴我們，在某一方面，我們和外在世界無法逃避的聯系，僅僅因為我們的存在，就影響了其他人的人生。
然而，2008界的哈佛畢業生，你們將如何更多地影響到其他人的人生呢？你們的才智，辛苦工作的能力，你們所取得的學業上的成果，給了你們獨特的位置，獨特的責任感。哪怕是你們的國籍，都把你們和一般人區分開來。你們之中的大多數，都來自于世界上唯一的超級大國。你們投票的方式，你們生活的方式，你們抗議的方式，你們對政府所施的壓力，都在國界之外發揮著影響力。這是你們的優勢，也是你們的負擔。
如果你們選擇用自己的地位和影響力去為那些不能發聲的人說話；如果你們選擇自己的感受不僅和那些強人同在，也和那些弱小同在；如果你們保持設身處地、為那些沒有你們那般優勢的人著想的能力，那么，將不僅僅是今天這些慶祝你畢業的父母家人為你驕傲，而且是成千上萬、因為你的幫助人生得以改善的人們。我們不需要魔法去改變世界，我們已經自帶了所有的能量：我們有能力去想像更好。
演講快結束了。還有一個給你們的愿望，那是我21歲時就已經有了的。畢業典禮那天坐在我身旁的朋友，成了我終生的朋友。他們是我孩子的教父教母，是我遇到困難會去求助的人，是好到我把他們名字用在“Death Eaters”上也沒有起訴我的朋友。畢業的時候，濃厚的感情，共同分享、再不會重來的歲月把我們綁在一起，當然，還有我們“以此為證”的合影：如果哪天哪個人做了總理，那可是價值不菲的寶貝。
所以今天，給你們最好的祝福莫過于，你們會像我一樣，擁有最珍貴的友誼。明天，我希望你們即使把我的演講忘得一干二凈，卻能記住，另一個古羅馬人的名言，當時我從職業階梯上敗退，逃到古典文學的廊道里，想尋找古老的智慧。這句話是：“人生和故事一樣：不在于它有多長，而在于它有多好。”
祝大家都有個非常好的人生！
謝謝諸位。
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