It was a windy, drizzly, gray afternoon, and I sat on the Widner Library to get a clear (if faraway) view of JK Rowling, who was an elegant figure in beige. The highlights of the graduation stuff leading up to JKR’s talk were a thirteenth-century drinking song (somehow not as stirring as you’d think), and a discussion about money left to the university for the purchase of meteorites and plants grown from spores, or for a scholarship for the best essay about book collecting (my friend Holger won that one year).

I didn’t go to my graduation, which I sort of regret, but I got to live vicariously through Namwali, class of ‘08, who showed up in the nick of time and without her regalia (but with a scarf for me, shivery and freezing). Namwali said that the morning half of the graduation exercises was fun, and there was a speech written entirely in Latin (Harvard is pree-ten-shus). “I learned how to say ‘we conquer’ in Latin: vincimus.”

Then we giggled about how lame it is that, in Latin, v’s are pronounced like w’s, so the word sounds like “winky moose.” “It made me think of a flirty caribou,” said Namwali.

Then the exercises got down to business, JKR business. Namwali and I were a little nervous, because the fact that someone is a legendary writer doesn’t mean she can give a good speech. But JKR was perfect—funny, affectionate, moving, earnest. She was, in fact, like Dumbledore.

She began by saying that she was grateful to Harvard, not only for the honorary degree given to her, but because “the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured have made me lose weight.” She decided she would try not to be nervous about the speech, and would pretend that all of the red banners in the Yard were just because she was at a Gryffindor reunion (though, honestly, I think it was a crowd of Ravenclaws).

She joked about the idea that some of the students before her might give up careers in the sciences or business “for the giddy delight of becoming a gay wizard,” and then segued into a more serious topic: the importance of failure. She talked about how she had defied her parents hopes that she would study something sensible at university, and had instead gone into classics. But, she added, she understood why her parents wanted her to study something that would lead to a sustainable career—and, in any event, “there is an expiry date for blaming your parents” (at which all of the alumni from ‘83 and other middle-aged persons cheered). She said she couldn’t blame her parents for wanting her not to experience poverty as they had, for poverty means “a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.”

Hardships that, as we all know, JKR experienced. But she explained that poverty in some ways stripped away everything about her that wasn’t essential, and allowed her to focus on what she always wanted to do: write. In fact, she said, if she had succeeded at anything else, she might not have succeeded at what mattered most to her.

She then discussed how, during the difficult times of her life, she had worked at Amnesty International, and read letters smuggled out of totalitarian countries, and the testimony of the tortured. She recalled meeting a man who had been rendered mentally ill by his experiences and who, though a foot taller than she, seemed “as fragile as a child.” Rowling was asked to escort him to the subway and, despite all that he had been through, he took her hand and wished her future happiness (the incredible generosity of such a gesture made my eyes well up with tears). Shortly thereafter, as Rowling waited for him, she heard a scream from behind a closed door, and was told that this man had just discovered that his mother had been executed.

Whereas the beginning of her speech was about failure, this section considered empathy and imagination. Her experience at Amnesty International was important because it, like books, allowed her to imagine herself in someone else’s position. Sometimes we may not want to imagine the lives of others, for it could give us nightmares. But, she said, she would not want to be the sort of person who does not exercise this kind of imagination, “for they have nightmares of their own.”

She pointed out that this kind of imagination is morally neutral, and that it is a power that can be used to manipulate. She quoted Plutarch (I probably have this slightly wrong): “’What we will achieve inwardly, will change outwardly.’”

She reminded the students that not only were they talented and accomplished, but that most of them were also members of the world’s only superpower. Rowling noted that the actions that they will take—the pressures that they could bring to bear on their government, their votes, etc.—have the possibility to change the lives of thousands. “This is your privilege,” she said, “and your burden.”

When Rowling experienced some desperate times, she was able to rely upon friends who had stood with her at graduation. She spoke fondly of these friends: “people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters.” Rowling called upon the class to remember, should they experience failure, that they have friends who surround them now.

Rowling concluded by quoting Seneca: “’As is the tale, so is life. Not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.’ I wish you all very good lives.”

Everyone stood and cheered.