I only came across the story of Marina KEEGAN today, but cannot now get her out of my head. Hence name changing & sharing.
MK was a student at Yale, graduating 6 weeks ago. As you will see from the link (at the bottom, but please read down to it, don't skip down to it), she was beautiful, intelligent & feisty; she clearly played a full part in student life, and was rewarded with a job on the New Yorker. She was a regular contributor to the Yale Daily News and wrote a final piece for the 2012 Commencement (= Graduation) edition, which she called "The Opposite of Loneliness".
In this, she exactly catches the emotions that I felt when I graduated so many centuries ago: how much I had loved it, ups & downs & all; how excited & scared & breathless I was at the thought of moving on; the soft contempt for those with easily mapped pathways or who felt that they had already lost their momentum in life; & the hard admiration for those who knew they could go on to change the world.
DC1, aged 22, has just graduated from a similar institution, so maybe I'm a little biased & a little vulnerable, but I really think that MK has perfectly caught the spirit of one particular moment in life: I do so much hope that my DC views the panorama of her future in the way MK did.
One line of "The Opposite... stands out in particular:
<strong>We?re so young. We?re so young. We?re twenty-two years old. We have so much time.</strong>
Within a week of this article being published, Marina KEEGAN was dead, killed in a car crash. How can this be true?
As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,
They kill us for their sport.
King Lear Act 4, scene 1, 32?37
www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/may/27/keegan-opposite-loneliness/