What’s next on ‘Art 2 Art’

Living up to its title, the radio program “Art 2 Art” continues to bring to listeners nationwide a range of personalities representing one art form to another. Aired every Sunday on dzRH from 3:30 to 4 p.m., the show is hosted by prima ballerina Lisa Macuja.
For the first three Sundays of August, “Art 2 Art” continues with its varied line-up of episodes, featuring guests from dance, visual arts and literature.
On Aug. 3, Macuja welcomes her Ballet Manila colleagues Osias Barroso and Gerardo Francisco who chat about choreography and the work they have been doing for the dance company’s latest production, “Halo Halo Supreme”. In their collaborative piece entitled “Pista,” the two draw on their background as folkloric dancers and the signature Vaganova technique that Ballet Manila is known for. They also explain the discipline it takes to be danseurs, what it’s like to teach dance, and what they do with their spare time.
On Aug. 10, Macuja interviews veteran painter and art educator Fernando Sena. Dubbed as the “Father of Philippine Art Workshops,” Sena shares that it was actually being an art scholar himself that motivated him to teach art to underprivileged youth. Now with over three decades’ experience in holding art workshops, Sena believes that people with an interest in learning how to draw or paint can develop their skills with the help of a good mentor. Sena is a member of the famed Saturday Group.
On Aug. 17, Macuja talks to Atty. Andrea Pasion-Flores, executive director of the National Book Development Board (NBDB). The NBDB is the lead government agency providing directions and the environment for the stimulation and improvement of the local book publishing industry. Flores discusses “Tulaan sa Tren”, an NBDB initiative which involves celebrity-read poems being aired on the LRT and MRT network. She also offers pointers in forming a book club and in stimulating reading among the young.
“Art 2 Art” is produced by the Manila Broadcasting Company, the largest radio network in the Philippines and in Asia with over 500 radio stations all over the country. Its flagship station, dzRH, is the oldest radio station in the Philippines covering 97% of the archipelago.

EW.com Exclusive: Stephenie Meyer's 'Breaking Dawn': Exclusive Preview

1. ENGAGED

NO ONE IS STARING AT YOU, I promised myself. No one is staring at you. No one is staring at you.

But, because I couldn't lie convincingly even to myself, I had to check.

As I sat waiting for one of the three traffic lights in town to turn green, I peeked to the right — in her minivan, Mrs. Weber had turned her whole torso in my direction. Her eyes bored into mine, and I flinched back, wondering why she didn't drop her gaze or look ashamed. It was still considered rude to stare at people, wasn't it? Didn't that apply to me anymore?

Then I remembered that these windows were so darkly tinted that she probably had no idea if it was even me in here, let alone that I'd caught her looking. I tried to take some comfort in the fact that she wasn't really staring at me, just the car.

My car. Sigh.

I glanced to the left and groaned. Two pedestrians were frozen on the sidewalk, missing their chance to cross as they stared. Behind them, Mr. Marshall was gawking through the plate glass window of his little souvenir shop. At least he didn't have his nose pressed up against the glass. Yet.

The light turned green and, in my hurry to escape, I stomped on the gas pedal without thinking — the normal way I would have punched it to get my ancient Chevy truck moving.

Engine snarling like a hunting panther, the car jolted forward so fast that my body slammed into the black leather seat and my stomach flattened against my spine.

''Arg!'' I gasped as I fumbled for the brake. Keeping my head, I merely tapped the pedal. The car lurched to an absolute standstill anyway.

I couldn't bear to look around at the reaction. If there had been any doubt as to who was driving this car before, it was gone now. With the toe of my shoe, I gently nudged the gas pedal down one half millimeter, and the car shot forward again.

I managed to reach my goal, the gas station. If I hadn't been running on vapors, I wouldn't have come into town at all. I was going without a lot of things these days, like Pop-Tarts and shoelaces, to avoid spending time in public.

Moving as if I were in a race, I got the hatch open, the cap off, the card scanned, and the nozzle in the tank within seconds. Of course, there was nothing I could do to make the numbers on the gauge pick up the pace. They ticked by sluggishly, almost as if they were doing it just to annoy me.

It wasn't bright out — a typically drizzly day in Forks, Washington — but I still felt like a spotlight was trained on me, drawing attention to the delicate ring on my left hand. At times like this, sensing the eyes on my back, it felt as if the ring were pulsing like a neon sign: Look at me, look at me.

It was stupid to be so self-conscious, and I knew that. Besides my dad and mom, did it really matter what people were saying about my engagement? About my new car? About my mysterious acceptance into an Ivy League college? About the shiny black credit card that felt red-hot in my back pocket right now?

''Yeah, who cares what they think,'' I muttered under my breath.

(c) 2008 by Stephenie Meyer, reprinted with permission from the Eclipse Special Edition published by Little, Brown and Company.

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20203238,00.html

Exclusive! Stephenie Meyer Reveals a Spoiler

Straight from the author and revealed with her approval, EW.com shares a key plot point from ''Breaking Dawn''

By Karen Valby

With the understanding that this spoiler will send the blogosphere into either a tizzy of celebration or outrage, EW.com hereby reveals a major plot point from Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final installment to her Twilight series. And no, the forthcoming information is not from a fever dream or a filched copy of the book found in the dusty stock room of a Barnes & Noble. This exclusive spoiler comes straight from Meyer herself, with her explicit go-ahead to share with her fans.

Team Jacob, you staged a valiant effort, urging Bella to choose her faithful, strangely muscular friend instead of her sexy, hairless vampire. But Meyer, clapping her hands and bobbing on her toes, reveals that she had the great fun of writing Bella and Edward's wedding scene. ''And it's not a dream sequence!'' Meyer promises with a laugh. ''It's the actual wedding between Edward and Bella. The wedding! I'm a girly girl so it's something I've been waiting for too.'' Before anyone throws their computer out their bedroom window, screaming that the surprise of the summer has now been ruined for them, Meyer promises that the wedding takes place early on in Breaking Dawn. Trust that unexpected thrills still await.

While we're on a roll, here's another surprise for you: Meyer says she wrote Bella and Edward's wedding scene years ago, initially planning for the young couple to tie the knot shortly after the end of Twilight. Her editor at the time balked that those crazy kids were too young to walk down the aisle, and Meyer, who herself was married and already raising her first son by the age of 23, shelved their eternal bond for a later date.

For those heartbroken that their heroine apparently picks Edward over Jacob, take comfort in the simple fact that Breaking Dawn exists. Meyer says she fought long and hard before her publisher agreed to a fourth book in the series. Little, Brown for Young Readers originally paid the author $750,000 for a three-book deal. Before Twilight had even hit the shelves, Meyer realized there was no way she could wrap up the characters' storylines in three books. But her publisher was nervous about shelling out another chunk of change for an unproven author. ''My books weren't out yet,'' she says. ''Nobody cared about me. I was just this little author they were taking a chance on.'' Eventually, Meyer prevailed, selling the fourth book for $400,000. Lucky Little, Brown. Breaking Dawn is expected to go down as the biggest book of the summer. Everybody wins. Even Team Jacob.

Comic-Con: ‘Twilight’ star Robert Pattinson talks about the Entertainment Weekly cover

First things first: Let’s talk about that EW cover.
Um, I guess my hair turned into a little bit of a toupee, didn’t it? I don’t know what happened. Laughs. I just sort of was like, it’s only out for a week anyway.

Tell us about having to play “beautiful.”
When I first read the script and heard about the casting I was thinking, ‘This is impossible. This is physically impossible to play this part.’ I kind of preempted what everyone’s reaction would be. There was also a very real possibility that you could get so freaked out by having to look 'beautiful' all the time that you just end up doing the whole thing, like, pouting. Like, ‘Can I just cut all my lines and just stand still so you can shoot it really well?’

So what’d you do?
I thought about it a lot. It was kind of a deceptively complicated character to play. When you look at what Edward says, it seems like he always says the right thing. Always just the perfect gentleman. But when you put it in the context of his actual life situation and it doesn’t compute that he would be this completely easygoing, normal guy. That’s what he was before, then he got bit. He’s still trying to be a nice guy, but he’s also killed like 50 people, so he’s kind of in a state of constant penance.

Ah yes, we know you read Stephenie Meyer‘s manuscript for “Midnight Sun,” essentially a re-write of “Twilight” from Edward’s point of view. It won't be published for a while. Any tidbits?
Bella never knows what’s going on inside Edward’s head. Throughout the entire series of books, she never really knows who he is. In 'Midnight Sun,’ you find that he hides a lot from her, you find out the things that he’s hidden. Even basic things like there are other vampires who are going to kill her; I mean he kind of lies about it for ages.

Did it help you do anything different with the part?
It’s interesting in “Midnight Sun” he’s kind of disgusted with himself, which is kind of how I saw Edward anyways. He knows (his relationship with Bella) is right but he can’t stand the fact that he keeps hanging around her. It’s like ‘I know I’m in love with her, I know that’s all well and good, but I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m a vampire, I should just accept that and kill myself now.’ It’s a lot of self-loathing. Laughs. And I wanted to play it 100% self-loathing the whole time, and nobody would let me. They had to kind of lighten me up a bit.

Might we hear more about this reported journal you kept to prepare for playing Edward?
I don’t know where the whole journal idea came from. I mean, I just wrote tons and tons of notes. I had like six versions of the script. I wrote of that while I was in Portland (where the movie was shot) for two months by myself. I was there before (director) Catherine Hardwicke or anyone else.

To get into character?
I wouldn’t be doing anything in London that would be of any help, and I thought that just being separated from anything that I knew would be good. Also, the accent. I thought it would be helpful if I just pretended to be American for two months.

How do you think it turned out?
It’s supposed to be sort of old-fashioned America. I haven’t actually seen it yet, but hopefully it worked out.

-- Denise Martin

URL http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2008/07/even-more-twili.html

Every Juan to T3

Cebu Pacific moves entire domestic and international operations to NAIA-3 on August 1

Cebu Pacific (CEB), the country’s largest domestic carrier, will use the Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 3 (NAIA-3) for both domestic and international flights starting on August 1, 2008.

CEB started its domestic ATR operations at NAIA-3 last July 22.

Lance Gokongwei, CEB President and CEO, said, “NAIA-3’s opening is a welcome development for us especially since we have outgrown both the domestic passenger terminal and NAIA-1. As the country’s fastest growing airline, we are very pleased to be offering our passengers a much improved airport facility.”

CEB expects to carry seven million passengers this year compared to almost 5.5 million passengers last year. In 1996, when CEB first started its operations, the total number of people flying within the country stood at 4.67 million, in 2007, this has more than doubled and now stands over 10.4 million passengers.

NAIA-3 exceeds the amenities provided by the Domestic Terminal such as:
A spacious check-in area, with 28 state-of-the-art counters allocated to Cebu Pacific as compared to 22 counters at the cramped check-in section of the Domestic Terminal;
Nine boarding gates, from four;

CEB operates 33 routes through its 24 domestic destinations and currently operates 848 domestic flights per week. The airline also operates 19 international routes to 16 cities in Asia, offering 230 international flights per week.

“Now that we will be flying both domestic and international services under one roof, we will be able to see some operational efficiencies and offer our passengers an even better product,” Gokongwei emphasized.

Now in its 13th year, CEB has the youngest aircraft fleet in the Philippines, comprised of 10 A319s, eight A320s, and two ATR72-500 aircraft.

SPEED DATING AT ONE ESPLANADE ON AUG 2

The Astring-O-sol Dating Marathon is the largest speed dating event ever where singles get a chance to meet their match as they go on "dates" with several people in the span of one evening. Each "date" just lasts for about 2 minutes.

If you don't get to meet your match that evening, I can at least guarantee the free food, free drinks and free concert by Hale.

10 magazine covers that got us talking

Entertainment Weekly: 'Twilight' vampire not hot-blooded enough

When author Stephenie Meyer wrote that “Twilight” hero Edward, the 17-going-on-108-year-old vampire, is supposed to be dazzlingly, blindingly beautiful, we’re pretty sure she didn’t mean in a rosy-lipped female kind of way. Pity then poor Robert Pattison, an actor whose one only claim to fame thus far is his small role as Harry Potter rival Cedric Diggory in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” The backlash was immediate. Once MTV.com posted an early preview of the cover, the site attracted hundreds of comments including this one from a poster identified as “Horrified”: "Edward looks like a ZOMBIE. The stylists and photographer obviously had no idea who the characters are…he looks like a hairy, powdered donut."

Issue date: July 14, 2008

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-10magazinecovers14-july14-pg,0,5472017.photogallery?index=9

what if you could wear inno sotto in your dream wedding?

COSMO YOUNIVERSE SECOND LEG!

WHEN: 26 JULY 2008, SATURDAY,
1:00 PM
WHERE: A. VENUE HALL

COSMO YOUNIVERSE SECOND LEG!

WHEN: 26 JULY 2008, SATURDAY,
1:00 PM
WHERE: A. VENUE HALL

His Golden Eyes

There's no one to blame but me.

I was so adamant that I have it in a hardbound copy.
So I wasted months- precious hours, days, weeks, of not knowing the gut-wrenching love of Edward and Bella.

Last Friday, I finally scored myself a hardbound copy, the last one in the bookstore, of Stephanie Meyer's 'Twilight'.

Lana, Ailleen, Red, and the rest of the people at the office, has long been prodding me to read it.
Saying I would like the love story of the beautiful vampire and the brunette.

Boy, they were wrong.
I've fallen in love with it.

I now spend my waking hours gloriously drunk on their love.

missing you.

Stomach in a knot while your song drown out the world.
I sit here missing your gentle laugh and the quiet strength of your touch.

How are you?
Is life still as good as you thought it was?

I wish I can just pick up the phone and call.
But you know I can't.

I have to let you go.
And free myself.

But damn it.
Its not supposed to be this hard.

JK Rowling's Commencement Address at Harvard

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

by J.K. Rowling
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 honor, 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 criticize 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 romanticized 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 realized,
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 empathize 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 mobilizes
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 sympathize.

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 willfully unimaginative see
more monsters. They are often more
afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathize 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.

2008 Harvard University Commencement,
June 5, 2008. Copyright of J.K. Rowling, June 2008

Have too many stuff?

Why not give it away to the ones who need it the most?