Site search
sponsored by
News
Sports
ENLARGE
Bill Duncan
These are troublesome times. Homes are being foreclosed. Long established companies are declaring bankruptcy or just closing their doors. Financial institutions are failing. Unemployment has reached levels almost to that of the Great Depression.
It was no surprise to me when best-selling author J.K. Rowling addressed the graduates of Harvard University last June and told them to expect hard times even while they clutched that coveted degree.
Usually, graduation speeches in places like Harvard paint a rosy future for the graduates. J.K. Rowling measured the times in which we are living and gave the graduating class the right message.
She didn't gloss over the facts, nor did she focus on her own phenomenal success as a writer of the Harry Porter series that made her one of the richest women in the world. Instead she spoke about her own failures, about a young woman who gave up her dream of writing novels to pursue a more practical career, one that would guarantee a larger, steadier income. Despite this, she told her audience, she ended up as an unemployed single mom “as poor as it is possible to be in Great Britain without being homeless.”
One day, she said, “I realized I had a wonderful daughter and an old typewriter.” She also had a story idea of a little boy who possessed magical powers. The idea turned into a character named Harry Potter.
The rest you might say is literary history, but as J.K. Rowling told her audience success was not instant. She struggled to get publishers interested, meanwhile working as a waitress virtually just for tips. She worked long hours, but continued to write that story about this strange, nerdy looking boy with magical powers. That dream became the foundation for rebuilding her life, she said.
“You might never fail on the scale I did,” she told that graduating class, “but 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 failed by default.”
She told that graduating class “you will never truly know yourself or your strength until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for it is painfully won and it has been worth more to me that any qualification I ever earned.”
Three cheers for J.K. Rowling for giving these privileged Harvard graduates the magic of Harry Potter and the courage to face a troublesome world in 2009.
I distinctly remember only one of the many verbose messages I heard at my own college graduation ceremony 60-odd years ago. We graduates had listened to all kinds of erudite words sending us forth with degrees in hand to meet our destinies. One single professor, the last of the multitude of robed scholars to speak, rose and quietly spoke into the microphone, saying he had a small piece of advice for us: to read what was on the doors of the massive auditorium as we left the university's hallowed halls to enter the real world.
One side said: “Push.” The other said, “Pull.”
And that, too, was good advice in that troublesome era.
Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.
It was no surprise to me when best-selling author J.K. Rowling addressed the graduates of Harvard University last June and told them to expect hard times even while they clutched that coveted degree.
Usually, graduation speeches in places like Harvard paint a rosy future for the graduates. J.K. Rowling measured the times in which we are living and gave the graduating class the right message.
She didn't gloss over the facts, nor did she focus on her own phenomenal success as a writer of the Harry Porter series that made her one of the richest women in the world. Instead she spoke about her own failures, about a young woman who gave up her dream of writing novels to pursue a more practical career, one that would guarantee a larger, steadier income. Despite this, she told her audience, she ended up as an unemployed single mom “as poor as it is possible to be in Great Britain without being homeless.”
One day, she said, “I realized I had a wonderful daughter and an old typewriter.” She also had a story idea of a little boy who possessed magical powers. The idea turned into a character named Harry Potter.
The rest you might say is literary history, but as J.K. Rowling told her audience success was not instant. She struggled to get publishers interested, meanwhile working as a waitress virtually just for tips. She worked long hours, but continued to write that story about this strange, nerdy looking boy with magical powers. That dream became the foundation for rebuilding her life, she said.
“You might never fail on the scale I did,” she told that graduating class, “but 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 failed by default.”
She told that graduating class “you will never truly know yourself or your strength until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for it is painfully won and it has been worth more to me that any qualification I ever earned.”
Three cheers for J.K. Rowling for giving these privileged Harvard graduates the magic of Harry Potter and the courage to face a troublesome world in 2009.
I distinctly remember only one of the many verbose messages I heard at my own college graduation ceremony 60-odd years ago. We graduates had listened to all kinds of erudite words sending us forth with degrees in hand to meet our destinies. One single professor, the last of the multitude of robed scholars to speak, rose and quietly spoke into the microphone, saying he had a small piece of advice for us: to read what was on the doors of the massive auditorium as we left the university's hallowed halls to enter the real world.
One side said: “Push.” The other said, “Pull.”
And that, too, was good advice in that troublesome era.
Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.
