Real monsters

J.K Rowling dio un discurso en Harvard titulado “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination”. Fue para los weyes que se graduan de ahí este año. En la facultad y en la vida pueden decir lo que quieran de ella, de sus libros y de los que nos gustan sus libros, a mí me vale. Yo soy fan. Lo que expresa en el discurso reafirma la admiración que le tengo a ella com persona y escritora (¿así o más ñoña?). Todo el discurso me gustó, en particular este fragmento en el que habla respecto a su experiencia en Amnistia Internacional. Me encantaría restregárselo a algunas personas en su jetota. Pero no vale la pena hablar con los necios porque los necios nunca escuchan.

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 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 can lead 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 may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

Conozco unos cuantos monstruos y monstruas por ahí.

Fuente: http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html