From todays Times of India: Yale Student’s last words CHALLENGE A NATION Marina Keegan died before she turned 23. What she left behind will make you cry We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time,” wrote Yale student Marina Keegan in her essay The Opposite of Loneliness as she was graduating from college. It was part of the graduation issue of the Yale newspaper and quickly went viral. It is a long essay, in which Keegan analyses the feelings of well-being and safety that being in college gave her. But Keegan was wrong. She did not have that much time. In fact, a mere five days after her graduation, as she was being driven to her father’s 55th birthday party by her boyfriend, she died. Her boyfriend, who was neither drunk nor speeding, went to sleep at the wheel, and while he escaped unscathed, Keegan was dead. The essay is now being collected along with some of her other writing by her family, teachers and friends. Most of the material in the book will come from her laptop, which her mother Tracy recovered from the wreck of the car in which she died. The book has already gathered wide attention, with Nicholas Kristof, the widely respected columnist, reviewing it for The New York Times’ Sunday Review. One of the most remarkable things about Keegan’s essay was the questions she raised about elite students opting for jobs with success built in. “She had sparked a national conversation about whether graduates should seek meaning or money,” as Kristof puts it. It was a topic that bothered her, and she often returned to the quest for ways of “living with meaning”. “Keegan was right to prod us all to reflect on what we seek from life, to ask these questions, to recognize the importance of passions as well as paychecks – even if there are no easy answers.” “This search for purpose in life is an elemental human quest – yet one we tend to put off. And we never know when time will run out,” says Kristof.
Posted on: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 04:23:36 +0000
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