on failure and imagination

Thanks to Laura for posting this.  My favorite parts -

on failure:
"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 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 the price of 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 is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned."

on imagination:
"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 emphathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared."

"Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced.  They can think 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 leads 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 emphathise 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."


You can get the whole text of the speech here.