JK Rowling毕业典礼致辞

Before watching this video,I had doubt about if it was too early for me to watch a commencement address because as you know,this is my first year in college and my college life has just started. Should a beginner be in a hurry to experience something placed in the end?But after watching,I get to know that there is really something you should know that has nothing to do with early or late.

What does it feel like to be invited to a situation as significant as the Harvard University commencement?This is a question I can not answer but Rowling can.She is aware of how grand this occasion is and she's surely very nervous,so instead of coping with it formally,she chose a British humorous way.It makes the whole speech not rigid but sort of rebellious which can help convey the instructive lesson more easily.She quoted the word Gryffindor in the very beginning to amuse her book fans.She also talked about her own commencement address given by Baroness Mary Warnock and she declared she didn't remember a single word of the former person now……making the audience laugh and impressing them.All she want to say maybe just be free.Breaking away from conventions is the best way to create.

She also mentioned that it’s great not to influence graduates to

reflect on their own career.The true meaning,you can see,might be that she has an amazing passion for writing but she knows how difficult it is to insist on this road.After all of these,she said,her key point today were the benefit of failure and the importance of imagination.

She recalled her disagreement with her parents about the major she was going to read for.They hoped that she would take a vocational degree but all she wanted to do was studying English literature and writing novels.At last,she studied modern languages that satisfied nobody.However,she didn’t blame her parents because she too understood the taste of poverty.Yes,poverty,which she suffered a lot.She admitted poverty was very very hard to bear in the darkest days of her life when she divorced,lost job and had one child to raise.You can imagine how it feels like.

Even faced with probably the most successful graduates in the world,she emphasized that they were bound to fail sometimes if they wanted to live indeed.But failure does have benefits.That is to strip away of the inessential and realize what you really cherish.It frees you to direct your energy into finishing the only work that mattered to you.

Then she turned to imagination.The second theme in her

address today.In her eyes,Imagination has a much broader sense than just rebuilding her life and actually the fount of all invention and innovation.However,its most transformative capacity in her mind was to enable us to empathise with people whose experiences we have never shared.She shared her own work experience in African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London with the audience.The story of a young African political victim was the most striking one,which made me tearful at last.She encouraged all the graduates to identify not only with the powerful but also with the powerless and used a cute wish to end her address:to value friendship.The most impressive sentence in her speech to me was:we don’t need magic to transform our world,we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already.