[기획]
해리 포터의 작가 `조앤 롤링`의 하버드大 연설
실패와 상상력이 세상을 바꾼다'해리 포터' 시리즈를 쓴 영국의 작가 조앤 롤링이 5일 미국 하버드대에서 명예 박사학위를 받고 축하 연설을 했다.그는 이 연설에서 인간에게는 더 나은 세상을 상상할 수 있는 힘을 갖고 있기 때문에 세상을 바꾸는 데 마법이 필요하지 않다고 전제한 뒤 졸업생들에게 '상상력'과 '실패'라는 두 단어를 간직할 것을 권고했다.연설의 주요 내용을 살펴보자."세상을 바꾸는 데 마법은 필요없습니다. 우리 내면에 이미 그 힘은 존재합니다."졸업 축하 연설을 준비하면서 저는 졸업 당시를 회상했습니다.그리고 21년 전 그날부터 지금까지 살아가면서 배워온 중요한 교훈이 무엇인지를 생각했습니다.저는 마음 속에서 두 가지 정답을 끄집어냈습니다.여러분들의 학문적인 성공을 축하하기 위해 모인 이런 뜻깊은 자리에서, 저는 '실패의 미덕'(benefits of failure)에 대해 말할 것입니다.그리고 '실생활'이라는 외부 환경에 들어가는 문턱에서 나는 또한 '상상력의 중요성'(crucial importance of imagination)을 크게 강조하지 않을 수 없습니다.이 정답들은 비현실적이거나 자기모순적인 대안일 수 있습니다.그러나 너그럽게 한 번 들어보세요.(중략)여러분들 나이에 가장 두려워 했던 것은 가난이 아니라 실패였습니다.여러분들은 젊고 재능있고 교육을 잘 받았기 때문에 어려움이나 고통을 알지 못한다고 생각하지는 않습니다.하지만 여러분이 하버드 졸업생이라는 사실은 곧 실패에 익숙하지 않다는 뜻이기도 합니다.성공에 대한 열망만큼 실패에 대한 공포가 여러분의 행동을 좌우할 것입니다.저는 대학을 졸업하고 7년 동안 엄청난 실패를 겪었습니다.결혼 생활을 오래 하지 못했으며 실업자 신세에다 가난까지 닥쳐왔습니다.누가 봐도 전 실패한 사람이었습니다.그 시기에 저는 정말 힘들었고，그 긴 터널이 언제 끝날지도 알 수 없었습니다.그럼 제가 왜 실패의 미덕에 대해 말하려고 하는 걸까요.실패가 제 삶에서 불필요한 것들을 제거해 주었기 때문입니다.저는 스스로를 기만하는 것을 그만두고 제 모든 에너지를 가장 중요한 일에 쏟기 시작했습니다.제가 가장 두려워하던 실패가 현실이 돼 버렸기 때문에 오히려 저는 자유로워질 수 있었습니다.실패했지만 저는 살아 있었고, 사랑하는 딸이 있고, 낡은 타이프라이터와 엄청난 아이디어가 있었지요.가장 밑바닥이 제가 인생을 새로 세울 수 있는 단단한 기반이 되어 준 것입니다.여러분은 저처럼 큰 실패는 하지 않을 것으로 믿습니다.하지만 인생에서 여러 번의 실패는 피할 수 없습니다.또 실패 없이는 진정한 자신에 대해，진짜 친구에 대해 알 수 없습니다.이 두 가지를 아는 것이 진정한 재능이고，그 어떤 자격증보다 가치가 있습니다.타임머신을 타고 대학을 졸업하던 그날로 돌아간다면 '인생은 성취한 일의 목록이 아니라는 것을 알면 행복할 수 있을 것'이라고 제 자신에게 말해주고 싶습니다.오늘 강연의 두 번째 화두는 상상력의 중요성입니다.여러분들은 이 화두를 고른 이유에 대해 그것이 내 삶을 재설계했기 때문이라고 생각하겠지요.절대로 그렇지 않습니다.저는 보다 넓은 의미의 상상력에 대한 가치에 대해 이야기하고자 합니다.상상력은 모든 발명과 혁신의 원천이기도 하면서도 자신이 직접 경험하지 못한, 겪어 보지 못한 타인의 경험에도 공감할 수 있게 하는 힘입니다.저는 20대 초반 런던에 있는 국제사면위원회(앰네스티) 본부에서 일했습니다.세계 각국에서 고문당한 사람，억울하게 사형당한 사람들의 사진과 사연이 쏟아져 들어왔습니다.독재국가의 비리를 전 세계에 폭로한 대가로 어머니가 사형을 당한 소식을 듣고 울부짖는 젊은이도 보았습니다.인간이 다른 인간에게 얼마나 사악한 일을 저지를 수 있는지 저는 매일 보고 듣고 읽었고 악몽에 시달렸습니다.반면 저는 그곳에서 타인의 아픔에 공감하는 인간의 힘도 볼 수 있었습니다.안전하고 행복하게 사는 평범한 사람들이，감옥에 갇힌 적도 없고 고문도 받은 일이 없는 그런 사람들이 어딘가에 있는 알지도 못하고 평생 만날 일도 없는 사람들을 구하기 위해 일하고 있었습니다.지구상의 어떤 생물과도 달리 인간은 경험하지 않고도 배우고 이해할 수 있습니다.다른 사람들의 마음을 헤아릴 수 있고，다른 사람들의 처지를 상상할 수 있습니다.물론 이러한 상상력의 힘은 제 책에 나오는 마법과 똑같이 선할 수도 악할 수도 있습니다.어떤 이들은 이 힘을 여론을 조종하고 사람들을 통제하는 데 쓰고，또 다른 이들은 타인을 이해하고 공감하는 데 사용합니다.플루타르크는 "우리가 내면에서 성취한 것이 우리 밖의 현실을 바꿀 것"이라고 했습니다.우리는 바깥 세상과 피할 길 없이 연결돼 있고，우리의 존재가 타인의 삶에 영향을 줄 수 있다는 것입니다.하버드 졸업생 여러분은 다른 이들의 삶에 어떻게 영향을 주실 건가요.여러분의 지성，여러분의 능력，여러분이 받은 교육은 특별한 지위와 함께 특별한 책임감을 부여할 것입니다.오늘 이 자리의 졸업생 여러분은 대부분 세계 유일의 초강대국 국민입니다.여러분이 투표하고，생활하고，저항하고，정부에 압력을 가하는 방식은 국경을 뛰어넘어 영향을 줄 것입니다.그것이 여러분의 특권이자 책임입니다.여러분의 지위와 영향력을 자기 목소리를 내지 못하는 사람들을 위해 사용한다면，힘없는 사람들과 자신을 동일시한다면, 여러분 같은 혜택을 받지 못한 사람들의 삶을 상상하는 힘을 간직한다면 여러분의 가족뿐만 아니라 전 세계의 약자들이 여러분의 졸업을 축하할 것입니다.세상을 바꾸는 데 마법은 필요하지 않습니다.우리 내면에 이미 그 힘은 존재합니다.우리에겐 더 나은 세상을 상상할 수 있는 힘이 있습니다.
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’ve experienced 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 fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention.
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, 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 still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal 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 has 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 might 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 could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.
They had 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 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 academically.
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 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 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 already 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 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 to me than any qualification I ever earned.
Given a time machine or 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.
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.
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 in the 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 think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave 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 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 given 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 minds, imagine 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 can lead 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 may 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 transform for the better. 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, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I’ve used 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 can 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.
[한경]해리 포터의 작가 `조앤 롤링`의 하버드大 연설 ... more
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