Month: June 2008

Picture is of wildflowers at Hi Rise Bakery yesterday, where Grace and I had lunch a deux. It was lovely.
I’m thinking today about generosity, and about gratitude. About the ways people show kindness and how the simplest gestures are both easy and hard. Feeling very thankful for so much in my life. One of my favorite quotations, on my mind today:

From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life. – Arthur Ashe

Click here for the annual slideshow of Princeton reunions. I am sitting at my desk with tears streaming down my face. We’re past reunions time, into full-blown summer now, but only by a week or two. This slideshow drew me tonight to two very different pieces of writing about Princeton.

I went digging in my files to find an old essay by Anne Rivers Siddons called Reunions Make Me Cry. I can’t remember if I have blogged about it before (this, surely, is an inflection point: when I’ve been writing long enough here that I cannot recall when I’m repeating myself – nor can I muster the effort to look through all the old posts to see). I love this essay. It’s short, poignant, and deeply evocative of those strange, wonderful days called Princeton reunions. She describes going back with her husband for his 25th and experiences the spectacle by his side for the first time. This is the old-school Princeton, which, for all of its male-only descriptors, is much of what I love about the place: tradition, a sense of comforting permanence, and an enthusiastic, unabashed embrace of spirit and loyalty.

I also re-read Lisa Belkin’s 2003 New York Times magazine article, The Opt-Out Revolution. I remember the waves this piece caused, I remember how many people forwarded it to me, and I remember reading it as a 29 year old on my first child’s first birthday (it was published on October 26th) and finding it depressing, demoralizing. Tonight, I was curious to see how 4 1/2 years of additional perspective would change how I felt about the piece. This time I was most intrigued by the end of the article, which talks about Princeton itself. About Shirley Tilghman and her heavily female leadership, about her comments about choices she had made in her own life, and finally about her struggles to educate a new generation of students who may have different priorities and values than those that came before. This made me love, anew, the new Princeton, that reflects the things that are on my mind today. The Princeton whose leadership in financial aid makes me glow with pride. The Princeton that promotes women not because they are women but because they are the best candidates for the job. The Princeton that finds a way, within its much-lauded tradition, to shift and evolve as the world changes.

This is the Princeton I love: multi-faceted, complex, secure enough in its deep foundation to take risks to keep up with the present day.

I have to close with a few of Anne Rivers Siddons’ paragraphs from Reunions Make Me Cry – these make ME cry. In my view, though, these images are only part of what makes the place so exemplary.

“But it was another kind of week, too, one that touched a deep chord within me, a well of poignance and simple love of continuity and tradition that, having no special academic traditions of my own to draw from, I never knew I had. Already bemused by the long heat, the very tangible old spell of the university, and the strong undercurrent of nostalgia running through the week, I understood on the last Saturday at least part of what draws these men, brisk, productive, good grown men, back like children to a picnic every year…”

“We wives clung closer together, in tight knots, feeling our men draw away fro us at last and into the body of ’48, into a whole where we couldn’t follow, as if into the ranks of Eleusinian initiates. Into Princeton….we saw them all together for the first time, a tiered shoal of orange and black and pride … The rock band crashed into “Goin’ Back to Old Nassau,” and I heard it for the first time, this song I had giggled so gleefully at, rolling at me across Princeton University as it had, on this same day, for reunions out of mind. I couldn’t find my husband in the throng and wouldn’t have known him if I had; they were all gone away from us now.”

“And then you heard it, very faint, very far away, the percussion first. “Goin’ back … goin’ back…goin’ back to Nassau Hall…” and then a regular cadence, which turned out to be the feet of marching men, and then 1500 male voices, aged 21 to 91 … They were absolutely beautiful, these Princeton men marching by on a sunny June Saturday … Behind them came perhaps the most poignant and gallant of them all, the Old Guard. The very oldest living Princetonians, singing “Goin’ back…” for what surely must be, for some of them, the last time … some were waving jauntily to the crowd from an open limousine. But others walked every step of the way, swinging along erect and vibrant, with perhaps only the common cord of Princeton sustaining them … Roars of pure love swelled to meet them.”

“Trudging back to headquarters, steaming hot and sunburned and emptied of emotion, I got lost and had ample time, wandering through the maze of shady quadrangles, to ponder why this simple, almost simplistic ritual, this near-archaic tribal rite, had moved me so deeply. I came to no conclusion. It seemed to me then, lost on that campus itself lost to time, that it was simply a right and good thing to honor something you loved very much as loudly and wholeheartedly as you could, and the devil take sophistication, civilization, undue examination, or whatever else threatened to get between you and it.”

A rainy Sunday in Marion. In a blissful turn of events the children slept in – way, way in – and we all got up around 8:40. At 6am Whit yelled to come into bed with me so I woke up with his feet poking into my tummy, but nevertheless the extra sleep was downright divine.
It’s pouring now and gray and oddly calm around here. Grace and Whit are going onto their third straight hour of television and I’m just sitting with the fan spinning overhead thinking. Had really, really interesting conversations yesterday and last night with my Dad – as usual he was (and is) insightful, wise, a little pessimistic, always wryly funny. He had some points of view re: my professional life, described a growing sense (that mirrors my own) that I’m in the wrong field, and told me with barely concealed pride that it was more and more evident that I’m truly a geek at heart. I don’t have any answers yet on what I will do next, or on what all of these musings ultimately mean, but I do know that the advice and input of those closest to me is beginning to distinctly converge.
I also know that there were several comments in JK Rowling’s amazing Harvard commencement address that touched intimately on my latest reflections. I think it’s such an extraordinary speech that I want to include it in full here. Read it – it’s worth it. Is not as amazing as Steve Jobs’ speech at Stanford (that I blogged last year) but it’s still wonderful.

Harvard University Commencement Address
June 5, 2008

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.

Just finished Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and it took my breath away. A beautiful book. Severe, spare but also incandescent; to me it spoke of the redemptive power of the mundane and of the need to be open to our lives taking different paths than we had imagined. To remaining open to grace occuring in ways, places, and people we had not anticipated. The narrator evinces a sense of wonder that is both gossamer and sturdy. Many quotations resonated with me. Since I like to chicken out and quote others rather than say my own piece (you know who you are, accuser of that!) here are some of my favorite passages:

There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that.

The sensation is of really knowing a creature. I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.

I feel in some ways as if I hardly knew him, and in others as if I have been talking to him my whole life.

This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

I can’t tell you, though, how I felt, walking along beside him that night, along that rutted road, through that empty world – what sweet strength I felt, in him, and in myself and all around us. I am glad I didn’t understand, because I have rarely felt joy like that, and assurance. It was like one of those dreams where you’re filled with some extravagant feeling you might never have in life, it doesn’t matter what it is, even guilt or dread, and you learn from it what an amazing instrument you are, so to speak, what a power you have to experience beyond anything you might ever actually need.

Now that I look back, it seems to me that in that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what I was waiting for.

Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time.

Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.

So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

I enjoy the hope that when we meet I will not be estranged from you by all the oddnesses life has carved into me.

When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you.

That’s her courage, her pride, and I know you will be respectful of it, and remember at the same time that a very, very great gentleness is called for, a great kindness. Because no one ever has that sort of courage who hasn’t needed it.

A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.

I have wandered to the limits of my understanding any number of times, out into that desolation, that Horeb, that Kansas, and I’ve scared myself, too, a good many times, leaving all landmarks behind me, or so it seemed. And it has been among the true pleasures of my life. Night and light, silence and difficulty, it seemed to me always rigorous and good.

Cataract that this world it, it is remarkable to consider what does abide in it.

I’d rather drop dead doing for myself than add a day to my life by acting helpless.

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?

I can imagine him beyond the world, looking back at me with an amazement of realization – “This is why we have lived this life!” There are a thousand thousand reasons to have lived this life, every one of them sufficient.

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be prevenient courage that allows us to be brave – that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is a great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.