the opposite of lonliness译文
2023年10月29日发(作者：prove的用法总结)
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Marina Keegan (1989-2012) 耶鲁大学2012届毕业生，英语专业。毕业典礼后的第五天，车祸身亡。她的父母设法从她挤压变形的笔记本电脑内抢救出了这些文字，得以出版。这篇小短文是她在毕业那天Yale Daily News上发表的文章，献给当时所有的毕业生。
We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say
that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and
what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow after Commencement and
leave this place.
It’s not quite love and its’ not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are
people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team.
When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four A.M. and no one goes
to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we
went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.
Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports
teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and
part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our
computers—partnerless, tired, awake. We don’t have those next year. We won’t live
on the same block as all our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group texts.
This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse, I’m scared of
losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling
I feel right now.
But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us.
They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New
York and away from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on
having parties when I’m thirty. I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE
BEST years comes from clichéd “should have…,” “if I’d…,” “wish I’d…”
Of course, there are things we wish we’d done: our readings, that boy across the
hall. We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too
late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my high
school self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us.
But the thing is, we’re all like that. Nobody wakes up when they want to.
Nobody did all of their readings (except maybe the crazy people who win prizes….).
We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our
perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that’s okay.
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
consciousness 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. The 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.
When we came to Yale, there was this sense of possibility. This immense and
indefinable potential energy—and it’s easy to feel like that’s slipped away. We never
had to choose and suddenly we’ve had to. Some of us have focused ourselves. Some
of us know exactly what we want and are on the path to get it: already going to med
school, working at the perfect NGO, doing research. To you I say both congratulations
and you suck.
For most of us, however, we’re somewhat lost in this sea of liberal arts. Not quite
sure what road we’re on and whether we should have taken it. If only I had majored in
biology…if only I’d gotten involved in journalism as a freshman…if only I’d thought
to apply for this or for that…
What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our
minds. We can start over. Get a post-doc or try writing for the first time. The notion
that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating from
college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility
because in the end, it’s all we have.
In the heart of a winter Friday night my freshman year, I was dazed and confused
when I got a call from my friends to meet them at Est Est Est. Dazedly and confusedly,
I began trudging to SSS, probably the point on campus farthest away. Remarkably, it wasn’t until I arrived at the door that I questioned how and why exactly my friends
were partying in Yale’s administrative building. Of course, they weren’t. But it was
cold and my ID somehow worked so I went inside SSS to pull out my phone. It was
quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass.
And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where
thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New
Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe.
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s
how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed,
humbled, scared. And we don’t have to lose that.
We’re in this together, 2012. Let’s make something happen to this world.