- Marina Keegan
Just five days after graduating from Yale, Marina was killed in a car accident on the way to see her family in Cape Cod to celebrate her father's birthday. A book of her essays has been released with a forward by her professor, mentor, and friend Ann Fadiman. Fadiman writes in the forward, "When a young person dies, much of the tragedy lies in her promise: what she would have done... But Marina left what she had already done: an entire body of writing far more than could fit between these covers."
In her most famous piece entitled "The Opposite of Loneliness" Marina wrote the following:
"We’re so young. We're so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out— that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement."
The message Marina now offers posterity is as simple as it is profound, the world does not wait, it does not slow down, and it ultimately does not relent. Humanity is a beautifully creative, tragic, passionate, and ultimately mortal entity... and we touch eternity only by what we contribute to this world.
What will your contribution be?