Today I learned (once again) from J. K. Rowling. The following is taken from her 2008 Harvard Commencement address in which she discusses the power of failure and imagination. (Which I am sad to say I had not seen until this afternoon.)
"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."
Read or watch in full here. It's a little long but worth it.
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