The Questioning Librarian

A few weeks ago, I came across an essay by the late Marina Keegan, a beautiful piece of writing marking the end of her time at Yale. " The Opposite of Loneliness " is an exploration of the uncertainty of the transition from college into life afterwards, and so much more than that, yet I was struck particularly by a line within. In disparaging the idea that once you leave college it is too late to change anything, she remarks that "We're so young. We're so young . We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time." Yet sadly, Keegan had very little time; she died in a car crash not long after her graduation. I admire the essay, and know that the line I cite is in service to the larger point of it. But I disagree. You don't have all the time in the world, even at twenty-two, even if you live to be ninety. The worst thing, the absolute worst, that you can do to yourself is to in any way justify your life by saying there is still plenty of time.  ...

Well, now I'm officially a graduate of Clarion University. It hasn't sunk in yet, but I'm certainly working on it. For all their ups and downs, all the success and failure, all the triumph and the heartbreak, the joy and the sadness, to say nothing of the immense quantities of coffee and stacks of books, my five years working on my undergraduate degrees have revolutionized my life. To shamelessly quote Dickens, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," and while there were times that I was absolutely in despair, I kept going and pulled through. And it has been the most worthwhile experience of my life. I feel like my mind has been opened to all the possibilities of the world, an openness that definitely was not present during high school. That is, I suppose, the point of college, in a higher sense. Beyond the job qualification it provides, beyond the parties and the people you meet, beyond that is the realization that there is an entire world out ther...