The Opposite of Loneliness

The Opposite of Loneliness

Caption: Marina Keegan, was a member of the Class of 2012 at Yale and wrote this essay for a special commencement edition of the Yale Daily News, before tragically passing away just days later. Her essay beautifully touches on themes of belonging and what she calls the opposite of loneliness, feelings that she experienced during her time at Yale. Marina's words are memorialized in the online archives of the Yale Daily News and in a book of her writings published posthumously by her parents. (Since the 90s, back-issues of the YDN have been stored online, and I have not been able to access a print version of this edition.) The images here are screenshots of the online archive page that features her essay. One interesting aspect of this webpage method of archiving is that the comments section is not closed, meaning that, if people wanted to, they could continue to comment on the essay years after she wrote it. Another aspect of the images I uploaded I would like to draw your attention to is the italicized note added beneath the photo of Marina ("The piece below was written by Marina Keegan ’12 for a special edition of the News distributed at the class of 2012’s commencement exercises last week. Keegan died in a car accident on Saturday. She was 22.") This note was added by a member of the Yale Daily News as a message to readers about Marina to contextualize the piece and its author.

Label: Marina Keegan (Yale Class of 2012) was 22 years old when she wrote her essay “The Opposite of Loneliness” for a special 2012 commencement edition of the Yale Daily News. Tragically, Marina died in a car accident just days after commencement. Yet, the memory of her spirit and the legacy of her beautiful prose live on in her written works, shared both via the print and online editions of the News as well as a collection of her essays, poems, and stories published by her parents in 2014.
I first encountered “The Opposite of Loneliness” in high school. Although she writes specifically to a Yale audience, Marina’s words burrowed into my mind for days, weeks, months after I read them. She captures so eloquently feelings which I had felt but could not name: that feeling of comfort, safety, and warmth found in relationship and company with others – that opposite of loneliness. Marina writes: “It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together.”
Inspired, I described my reactions to her essay in a letter I wrote to her in 2016 for a contest called Letters About Literature. There, I told her: “Thank you, Marina, for giving me the hope, inspiration, and determination to become the writer I one day hope to be.” Marina’s words can speak to all of us, for no matter where we are in life, we all long for that “opposite of loneliness.”

Marina Keegan

Yale Daily News, https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/05/27/keegan-the-opposite-of-loneliness/

Yale Daily News

May 27, 2012

Online newspaper archive

English