| — | April, Revolutionary Road |
Showing posts with label taken in transit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label taken in transit. Show all posts
Saturday, July 9, 2011
The Truth
“And you know what’s so good about the truth? Everyone knows what it is however long they’ve lived without it. No one forgets the truth, Frank, they just get better at lying.”
Friday, July 8, 2011
Ramen :D
Can't wait to try out some of these recipes!
On A Budget? 5 Ways to Eat Ramen for Dinner
Times are tight, budgets are pinched. We had two dollars left in our food budget on Tuesday of last week, so I buzzed to the store and bought the only thing I could think of. Ramen. At 17 cents a package, ramen has to be the best food deal out there. And, it’s a fun deal, too. Because a packet of ramen isn’t just soup waiting to be made. It’s actually a blank canvas ready to be turned into art. Here are 10 super-simple ways to pimp out your ramen and make it into a simple, satisfying dinner.
1. Veggie Ramen (pictured above) . Toss a tablespoon of butter into a skillet. Add 2 tablespoons each of thinly-sliced carrots, frozen green beans, frozen white corn, and edamame. Cook just until softened. Add a packet of Pork Ramen, 2 cups of water, and cook until the noodles are cooked through, about 6 minutes. Add seasoning packet. Serve and enjoy.
2. Egg Foo Ramen. In a small bowl, whisk an egg with 1 tablespoon of water until well beaten. Bring 2 cups of water to a boil in a small saucepan. Pour egg into the water, then add the noodles. Cook just until tender. Season with seasoning packet. Garnish with sliced green onions.
3. Chinese Chicken Salad. Shred 1/4 a head of cabbage, 1 breast of chicken, and 1/4 white onion. Add 1 package of crushed Chicken-flavored Ramen. In a small bowl, whisk together the seasoning packet, 2 tablespoons of oil, 2 tablespoons of white vinegar, and 2 tablespoons of sugar. Toss dressing into salad, serve and enjoy.
4. Ham Fried Ramen. A simple take on Fried Rice, cook a packet of Pork Ramen until the noodles are tender. Drain completely. In a skillet, heat 1 tablespoon of sesame oil and 1 tablespoon olive oil until sizzling. Add 1/4 cup diced ham and 1/4 cup of frozen peas & carrots to the oil. Immediately toss in the noodles. Crack an egg into the mixture and stir until well cooked and distributed around the noodle mixture. Season with soy sauce, garnish with a handful of diced green onions.
5. Parmesan Ramen. Cook a packet of ramen noodles. Save the flavoring packet for another day. Once the noodles are cooked, drain the water from them completely. Top with a pat of butter, a bit of freshly-shredded parmesan, and some chopped parsley.
For 5 more great Ramen recipes, visit Babble.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Mangyari Lamang
Rico Abelardo
Mangyari lamang ay tumayo ang mga nagmamahal
Nang makita ng lahat ang mukha ng pag-ibig
Ipamalas ang tamis ng malalim na pagkakaunawaan
Sa mga malabo ang paningin.
Mangyari lamang ay tumayo rin ang mga nagmahal at nasawi
Nang makita ng lahat ang mga sugat ng isang bayani
Ipadama ang pait ng kabiguan habang ipinagbubunyi
Ang walang katulad na kagitingan ng isang nagtaya.
Mangyari lamang ay tumayo ang mga nangangambang magmahal
Nang makita ng lahat ang kilos ng isang bata Ipamalas ang katapatan ng damdamin
Na pilit ikukubli ng pusong lumaki sa mga engkanto at diwata.
Mangyari lamang ay tumayo ang mga nagmahal, minahal at iniwan ngunit handa pa ring magmahal
Nang makita ng lahat ang yaman ng karanasan Ipamalas ang katotohanang nasaksihan
Nang maging makahulugan ang mga paghagulgol sa dilim.
At sa mga nanatiling nakaupo,
Mangyari lamang ay dahan-dahang umalis papalabas sa nakangangang pinto
Umuwi na kayo at sumbatan ang mga magulang Na nagpalaki ng isang halimaw!
At sa lahat ng naiwang nakatayo,
Mangyari lamang ay hagkan ang isa’t isa at yakapin ang mga sugatan
Mabuhay tayong lahat na nagsisikap na makabalik sa ating pinagmulan Manatiling masaya at higit sa lahat magpatuloy sa pagmamahal.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
take me on a food trip!
Taken from Yahoo!
10 Best Regional Foods in America
No matter how you slice it, food can tell you a lot about a place.
More from SmarterTravel.com
- America's Best Ice Cream Shops
- 10 Great Farm Stays in America
- Top Five Bargain Destinations for Fall 2010
More from Yahoo! Travel
The U.S. boasts an array of regional culinary creations that offer insight into the history, climate, and culture of the place. Though there are way too many to list, here are 10 different foods that are sure to whet your appetite, from po-boy sandwiches to key lime pie.
Lobster RollMaine
Its origins may be a bit unclear, but there's no denying that Maine and lobster rolls are a match made in seafood heaven—it is the official state sandwich, afterall. New Englanders take pride in the hefty chunks of chilled cooked lobster meat lightly tossed with mayonnaise and served on a toasted hot dog bun. Though there are many twists on the recipe, including warm butter in place of the mayo or the addition of celery and a plethora of spices, true purists prefer their lobster rolls to be pretty bare bones.
Visitors can find this extravagant, yet humble, sandwich served at almost every restaurant in Maine, but there are a few places that bring it to new heights, including Shaw's Fish & Lobster Wharf in New Harbor, Bagaduce Lunch in Brooksville, and Waterman's Beach Lobster in South Thomaston, among many others.
Sourdough BreadSan Francisco
The history of sourdough bread is closely related to the men who came to San Francisco in 1849 in pursuit of gold. These 49ers would buy bread "starters," a fermented mixture of yeast, water, and flour, to bake fresh loaves on the trail, but discovered a sour flavor to the bread unlike anywhere else in the world. It's because San Francisco's climate produces wild microorganisms unique to the area, giving the bread its tangy bite. Seasoned miners even came to be known as "sourdoughs" for their time spent fermenting in the mines.
Meanwhile, a French baker by the name of Isidore Boudin struck culinary gold when he combined the sourdough starters with French baking techniques. The finished product was a loaf of bread, crusty on the outside and light and airy with a bit of a tart kick on the inside. Sourdough bread is now sold all over the city, but you can still buy it from the bakery that started it all, the Boudin Bakery.
Po-boy SandwichNew Orleans
Though there are many competing tales of when the po-boy was created, most people believe that the sandwich came to be during the streetcar driver strike in the 1920s, when restaurant owners, Clovis and Benjamin Martin invented the cheap eat to support the strike and feed the unemployed streetcar drivers. When a worker would approach the rear of the restaurant to purchase a sandwich, the kitchen staff would yell out, "Here comes another poor boy!" Eventually, the name stuck.
The original po-boy was made using French bread, leftover bits of beef, and gravy, but there are many different versions today, including the popular shrimp po-boy, made with deep fried Gulf shrimp, lettuce, tomatoes, and hot sauce. Po-boys are sold in restaurants all over the Big Easy, but it's hard to beat Johnny's Po-Boys, which has been serving the affordable sandwich for more than 50 years.
BagelsNew York City
Bagels may not have been invented in New York City, but they're as much a part of its culture as the Empire State Building. The recipe for the doughnut-shaped rolls came to the Big Apple in the 1880s, with the arrival of thousands of Eastern-European Jewish immigrants. In fact, so many individual bagel shops cropped up during this time that it became necessary to establish an International Bagel Bakers Union.
The New York-style bagel is made with salt and malt, and boiled before it's baked. The end result is a large doughy crust surrounding a fluffy and chewy interior. There is also great debate among New Yorkers on whether a fresh bagel should be toasted or not. Two of the more famous bagel spots are H&H and Ess-a-Bagel, but there are so many lesser-known places waiting to be discovered.
Key Lime PieKey West
As the story goes, fresh milk wasn't so easy to come by before the railroad came to Key West in 1912, making it very difficult to create custard pies. However, the invention of Borden's sweetened condensed milk in 1859 put desserts back on the kitchen table, and eventually led to the invention of the official state dessert for Florida. No one is quite certain who made the first key lime pie, but there's no denying that the combination of condensed milk, local key lime juice, egg yolks, and sugar poured over a graham cracker crust put this southern Florida town on the food map.
Many pie lovers today are torn between pastry or graham cracker crust and whipped cream or meringue topping. Almost every restaurant on the island offers a variation of the tangy treat, but there are a few places that are noted for making the best Key Lime Pie, including Blue Heaven, Kermit's Key West Key Lime Shoppe, and the Blond Giraffe.
Philly Cheese SteakPhiladelphia
The Philly cheese steak, with its long crusty roll, filled to the brim with grilled, thinly sliced rib eye steak and smothered in neon orange Cheez Wiz, is as much of a Philadelphia icon as the Liberty Bell. There are several variations on the original sandwich, including provolone instead of Cheez Whiz, the addition of onions and green peppers, and thicker cuts of meat versus the shaved steak.
The mouthwatering mixture of cheese and beef was discovered in 1930 by Pat Olivieri, founder of Pat's King of Steaks, while making hot dogs. And though there's plenty of dispute over which of the city's restaurants reign supreme, Pat's and Geno's Steaks, located directly across the street from one another, are part of one of the greatest rivalries in food history.
Deep Dish PizzaChicago
One thing is for certain about the history of Chicago pizza: In 1943, a restaurant started selling a new item under the name, "Deep Dish Pizza," and the city's food scene was never the same again. There is some debate over who was the genius behind the tasty variation on traditional pies, but the true identity remains a mystery. The creator may never be found, but his pizza, with layers of ingredients stacked like a casserole and finished with sauce on top, will live on forever.
The first thick pie was served in a restaurant on East Ohio Street by the name of The Pizzeria, which soon became Pizzeria Uno. The restaurant is still there today, but you can find a slice of deep dish on almost every street corner in the Windy City.
BarbecueNorth Carolina, Memphis, Kansas City, Texas
Barbecue is serious business, and a surefire way to start a food fight is to claim that one region does it better than the next. Memphis, North Carolina, Kansas City, and Texas each represent a different style of barbecue: Memphis is known for its pulled pork shoulder slathered in a sweet tomato sauce and served with or without a bun; Kansas City revels in dry-rubbed ribs; Texas loves all things meat, from mesquite-grilled brisket to pulled pork; and North Carolina is all about the whole hog, smoked in a vinegar-based sauce.
A misconception about barbecue is that it's dependant on grilling. In fact, most would agree that it requires a great deal of skill and time to slow roast pork or beef until the meat nearly falls off the bone, and almost every great barbecue master has a special method or technique to get it just right. This accounts for why there are so many different flavors and varieties of barbecue, and why each is tasty in its own right.
Crab CakesMaryland
The idea behind crab cakes can be traced back to ancient times when seafood was scarce, and the best way to make the most out of the valuable commodity was by combining it with other ingredients in a patty. It's then believed that crab cake-style recipes were brought to the U.S. by English settlers during the colonial period, when Maryland locals used crabs native to the area to make the now famous crab cakes.
Basic Maryland, or Baltimore, crab cakes are typically made using fresh blue crab, bread crumbs, Worcestershire sauce, and a few binding ingredients before being formed into a patty and fried in butter. However, there are a plethora of variations on this simple recipe found all over the state, ranging from recipes served at upscale restaurants to sandwich shops.
Cheese CurdsWisconsin
Since Wisconsin is fondly referred to as the Cheese State, it seemed only fitting to highlight one of its greatest culinary commodities, the cheese curd. These peanut-sized snacks are created during the cheese making process when the milk curdles and before the cheese is processed into blocks. Fresh curds are rubbery in texture, salty to taste, and "squeak" when you bite them, hence the nickname, "squeaky cheese." Curds that sit out too long lose their noise and become a bit dry.
Cheese curds come in a variety of different flavors these days, including dill, jalapeno, and bacon, but it's hard to beat the classic yellow cheddar curd. Farms, gas stations, and grocery stores all over the state sell the noisy treat, but Mars' Cheese Castle in Kenosha is one of the more popular places to get them.
(Editor's Note: SmarterTravel.com is a member of the TripAdvisor Media Network, an operating company of Expedia, Inc. Expedia, Inc. also owns Expedia.com and Hotwire.)
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
17 Again
I saw 17 Again for the nth time last night.
"I wish I could finish all the things I started." - Mark, 17 Again
"I wish I could finish all the things I started." - Mark, 17 Again
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Saturday, July 3, 2010
New Moon summed up
Edward: bella i am leavin
Bella: ok ima go n pack brb
Edward: lol u aint commin w/ mi tho i dnt want u ho step back
Bella: i am creying dnt go w8
Jacob: i am a wolf
Bella: oo0o0o0o0 another mythical creature i luv u
Jacob: i luv u 2 tho sfm
Bella: loljk
Jacob: oh
Alice: edword thanks ur ded grl we gotta go
Bella: brb
Alice: run bella RUNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bella: w8 edword i am alive u c!@@@#Q@
Edward: oh ok lets go home
Bella: i luv u sm dnt eva do dat agen!!!!!!
Edward: marry mi (for da seXXXX)
Bella: i am tied down 2 no man but i want 2 be w/ u 4eva man maek me a vampire
Edward: no
Bella: ok ima go n pack brb
Edward: lol u aint commin w/ mi tho i dnt want u ho step back
Bella: i am creying dnt go w8
Jacob: i am a wolf
Bella: oo0o0o0o0 another mythical creature i luv u
Jacob: i luv u 2 tho sfm
Bella: loljk
Jacob: oh
Alice: edword thanks ur ded grl we gotta go
Bella: brb
Alice: run bella RUNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bella: w8 edword i am alive u c!@@@#Q@
Edward: oh ok lets go home
Bella: i luv u sm dnt eva do dat agen!!!!!!
Edward: marry mi (for da seXXXX)
Bella: i am tied down 2 no man but i want 2 be w/ u 4eva man maek me a vampire
Edward: no
LOL. I liked Eclipse though. Hahaha
Monday, June 28, 2010
"Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It’s the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last. Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist. Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy. I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph."
-Jack Gilbert
-Jack Gilbert
Friday, June 18, 2010
Monday, February 1, 2010
The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
Copyright of JK Rowling, June 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 have endured 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 convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.
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, the 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 come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self 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 have 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 may 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 would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.
So they 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 the 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.
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 that 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 then 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 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 it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
So given 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.
Now 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 personally 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 at the African 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 speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left 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 back 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 had to give 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 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 empathise 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 change. 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, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took 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 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.
http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination
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 have endured 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 convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.
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, the 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 come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self 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 have 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 may 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 would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.
So they 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 the 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.
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 that 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 then 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 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 it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
So given 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.
Now 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 personally 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 at the African 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 speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left 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 back 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 had to give 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 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 empathise 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 change. 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, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took 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 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.
http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
keeping it simple
"...a simple thought about marriage: this woman is all women, and when you chose her, you became Jay Gatsby and Robert Jordan and Prince Andre and Raskolinov and Ishmael and embarked on a life of imagination, which adultery cruelly violates, and breaks up the music in your head,and also it's a hell of a lot of work to scout up something inferior to what you and she can create at home.You have roamed the Western world in search of a the perfect tuna sandwich; your wife makes a good tuna sandwich; your powers of imagination are what make it perfect."
- Garrison Keillor, "Love Me"
- Garrison Keillor, "Love Me"
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