I have fallen in love. Again.

This time the object of my affection is at a distant remove from me. However, just a few weeks ago, she stood only some 30 yards out of reach. Since then she has returned home and remains more than three thousand miles away.

She is also almost forty years younger than I am, but what does age have to do with true love?

Her good looks and her charm have exerted a powerful attraction for me. How could her first husband break with a woman like this?

Her name is J.K., letters known to millions of people throughout the world. Children, and those who have emerged from childhood not so long ago, are familiar with her; my generation is less so.

My new inamorata’s last name is Rowling (the first syllable pronounced as in row your boat.) Hers may not be a name in your household, but it deserves to be.

Ms. Rowling is, of course, the woman who wrote the seven Harry Potter novels that have sold millions in the English-speaking world and have been translated into some 35 other languages.

These books have excited young people enough to keep them up late reading. And, on the eve of publication of each next volume, children have donned costumes, mobbed bookstores, or spent the night happily locked down in public libraries.

I admit to not having been present at these events myself. However, to me it is a great feat for a writer to have held the attention of such a throng of young readers and at least some of their enthusiastic elders.

Seriously, my feelings about J.K. Rowling go far beyond the attractiveness of the person. Nor does her achievement in becoming one of the richest women in the world make me care about her.

Rather, her views of the world and of human life explain my regard for her. In the speech she gave at the Harvard Commencement last month, she displayed a set of values that left me deeply appreciative of her outlook.

Incidentally, though she mentioned feeling “weeks of fear and nausea” at the prospect of speaking there, her talk showed no signs of either. Instead, her delivery was polished and confident, commending the sincerity of her views.

She emphasized two themes. The first ─ the paradoxical benefits of failure ─ relied heavily upon her own experience as a single woman, living at one time in near-desperate poverty.

Of that soul-searing experience she said: “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.”

To that wisdom she added: “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.”

Her second topic was imagination. Unless warned by her, most listeners would have expected the author to speak of the inner resources that inspired the fictional world of Harry Potter.

Instead, Rowling shared what she had learned from working in the office of Amnesty International in London. There, her awareness of the world’s sufferings became broadened beyond anything she had known previously.

She told how her outlook had been changed by contact with those suffering the deprivation of their rights. “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.”

But this experience was not merely negative.  Rowling added:  “And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.”

This seemed to me not the conventional view of imagination on the part of a writer of fiction. Not everyone has access to that kind of creativity.

Turning one’s imagination to the daunting problems faced by other people around the world ─ that seems to me of special value. J.K. Rowling has clearly not allowed unimaginable success to spoil her.

So let no reader of this column scoff at my late-blooming love affair. The object of my affection is a woman of real substance.

If you should see me this summer sitting on a subway car or bus reading a book, don’t be surprised if it is one of the Harry Potter series. And I’ll be glad to let you look over my shoulder.

Richard Griffin