A few months shy of embarking on the adventure that would be my first year of undergrad, I read an essay called “The Opposite of Loneliness”: an incisive, poignant piece written by Marina Keegan, a former liberal arts student at Yale and a fledgling writer who died in a tragic car accident just a day after her graduation in 2012. The brooding writer burgeoning within me viewed Keegan—an authentic voice who spoke sincerely and sharply of the concerns of her generation—as a template after whom to model my pretentious college self.
In her essay, Keegan wonders if we have a word in the English language to describe the titular feeling—the opposite of loneliness. Over the past two years of the pandemic and its associated polarisation, isolation, unfulfilled expectations (both academic and personal), and the underlying feeling that things couldn’t get worse than this (only for them to plummet to unprecedented depths), I think many of my fellow graduating peers may be asking themselves the same question. Senior years are meant to be the most memorable—at least according to the metanarrative, enshrined by countless bildungsromans, of growth and development during one’s school years. The cynics of our generation may scoff at this notion, but it doesn’t stop us from wanting to emulate it to a degree.
There’s an ideal we’re all taught to strive for as UofT students: hyper-productive, overachieving, anguished, stretched too thin (as Bilbo Baggins put it) like butter scraped over too much bread, yet still maintaining the facade of effortless excellence. Many of us may torture ourselves to conform to this image because somewhere along the way, we were led to believe that to do otherwise is to leave our potential unfulfilled. Those of us who were already like that in high school just continued the routine. I didn’t identify with the above descriptors before coming to UofT, and the effort it took me to achieve that ideal (in the briefest of moments, when academic burdens demanded) disillusioned my view of higher education, made me less curious, and drained me of the desire to venture down new intellectual rabbit holes. I don’t want to have to live up to those standards anymore. So why does the prospect of leaving the institution that enforced them still give me premature pangs of loss?
As a freshman, unable to look forward more than a few weeks at a time, I boldly assumed that by fourth year, my future self would have somehow figured everything out. Instead, my senior year felt like walking across a wooden bridge made of planks that only appear one step ahead of me at a time. At the moment, it feels like the person I am and the person I need to become are making eye contact with each other from opposite ends of a shared room, but neither has the courage or spiritual wherewithal to approach the other.
Perhaps unlike some of my keener peers, I have no set next step, just the nebulous aspirations in the far-distant future of any English graduate. A catalogue of distant possibilities—distant maybes. Grad school. Law school. An MFA. A bohemian existence defined by my coffee-shop job and my novel-in-progress. An itinerant, nomadic lifestyle now that travel is less prohibited. A dream job as a New Yorker staff writer. An acclaimed screenplay.
I continue to assuage my doubts about my directionlessness by telling myself that a sense of direction is overrated. After all, haven’t some of the most prolific works of art throughout history showed us protagonists fated to thrive in directionlessness? Whether it be Odysseus sailing across the undulating and unforgiving Mediterranean waves, or Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” staring out upon that vast ambiguous nothingness, containing a world of infinite possibilities?
I’ve always been plagued by nostalgia, but it was only during one of my first-year courses that I came to learn of the word’s etymological roots. “Nostalgia” is a compound of the ancient Greek words for nostos (“home”) and algia (“pain”). Put together, a painful homecoming. Returning to campus this past September, rekindling old connections—back when we seemed to be experiencing a glimmer of normalcy—I felt that pain in fragments. Pain caused by the realisation that in a year’s time I wouldn’t be here. No more catching snippets of conversations around communal campus spaces from students venting to their friends about the difficulty of their current course load. No more casual glances at an industrious student, empathising with their plight as they plough through pages of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf translation, trying in vain to absorb the alliterative verses.
My relatively brief life as a reader has been marked by a feeling of isolation, like I’ve been a little out of place in my literary circles. Not nerdy or knowledgeable enough about comic book minutiae for my high school friends. Not as acquainted with the anointed ‘classics’, lacking a refined literary palette compared to some of my fellow English majors. Not as enthusiastic about new-wave sci-fi and fantasy stories as the next generation of speculative fiction readers. I’ve worn each of these distinct genre hats at various times, never feeling like any of them fit me properly. I’m reminded of the Greek root word for “personality”—persona (“mask”). These identities—the comic book nerd, the literary snob, the speculative fiction enthusiast—are all interchangeable masks. The most powerful sense of belonging I’ve felt has been in the transitional spaces, within the grey areas of overlap between these seemingly disparate circles, where they all come together like puzzle pieces to form a greater whole. Right now, on the precipice of graduation, is one such moment—when these disparate parts of me form a complete individual who is embarking on a journey to somewhere.
One of my favourite lines that I’ve encountered throughout my literary journey these past four years is the following, from John Webster’s Renaissance tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi: “We are merely the stars’ tennis balls, struck and bandied / Which way please them”. Its metaphor feels oddly ahead of its time, and not just because of the objects in question. For me, Webster’s line encapsulates our lack of agency over the past two years. Since 2020, it feels like we’ve been bounced between one catastrophic, world-altering event and the next in a difficult, familiar, rhythmic pattern of a bouncing ball within the swing of fate’s hand. And it resonates with me because of how often I spent the past year hitting tennis balls against the wall, whether late at night or during sleepy afternoons around Trinity College, looking for a burst of inspiration, while others were, perhaps more usefully, expending their energies towards final assignments, exams, or building towards their futures. Maybe this daily ritual of mine was an attempt to regain (or at least replicate the feeling of) some agency over my own fate and trajectory.
In her essay, Keegan expressed a heart-swelling sentiment: the fear of waking up on the day after graduation, removed from everything and everyone she came to know and love over four years. It’s a fear I share: waking up, only to realise that all of this around me had been a fleeting fantasy. Earlier this year, one of my friends commented on the old photos she found as she combed through the annals of Acta Victoriana from the ‘40s and ‘50s—photos portraying all manner of frosh and hazing rituals. “They had so much school spirit back then,” my friend—a second-year student, denied a proper first-year experience because of the pandemic—remarked wistfully. Perhaps she was right. Then again, the kids frozen in time in those sepia-toned photographs, like us, were also living through their own set of world-shattering conflicts, and still they found a way to come together, managing to find light in the darkest of times.
It made me think that perhaps there are valuable lessons to learn from previous generations, as did another one of my most memorable moments from undergrad. In December of 2020, I interviewed one of my favourite authors, the comic book writer Rick Remender, for Hart House Lit & Lib’s literary affairs podcast Endnote. Remender, an off-kilter and authentic creative voice, spoke of Gen X punk rock staples with the same reverence as English students are supposed to regard Shakespearean sonnets. He had plenty of gems to drop, but one of them struck me above the others:
“I think every writer who I respect in some form or another has repeated the same quote: ‘Get out deep in the water to where your feet can’t touch the ground, and you feel a little afraid.’ And that’s what I’ve always tried to do […because] complacency is the enemy of good art.” A piece of advice I’ve only just begun to absorb, on the cusp of leaving an institution that’s been equal parts comforting and constraining. Taking my final walks around campus these past few months, I know that I’ll never have this opportunity again in my life—being in an environment of people who are grappling with similarly unfulfilled potential, just as lonely and uncertain as me, yet still comfortable in each other’s company—even if it didn’t start out that way.
There are bits from Keegan’s “The Opposite of Loneliness” that I can only appreciate in retrospect, like this one: “There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense […] That others are somehow more ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving.” This feeling accompanied me throughout that first year in my new school surroundings. I felt completely out of my depth, the most ignorant person in the room, left out of the loop on some secret that everyone else seemed to know. Yet as time progressed, I developed a fondness for that ignorance. It grew whenever I eavesdropped on a lively debate, amidst the cosy wooden walls of Graham Library (in the Silent Study section, no less). When I replicated those kinds of discussions with my newfound friends, on topics equal parts profound and pedantic, continuing well into the evening. “When the check is paid and you stay at the table,” said Keegan—a familiar scenario for me throughout all four of my undergrad years. When we were laughing, learning, loving each other’s company, and realising that maybe we were headed in the same direction after all—even if we don’t all know where we’re going.
I’ve spent four years reading the lofty words of countless writers throughout history and learned that some things can’t be adequately articulated through language. As hard as Keegan or I may try to render what “the opposite of loneliness” is like into prose, this feeling is ultimately indescribable. As one chapter of my life comes to a close and the unknown sprawls out before me, it’s comforting to know that some of the greatest experiences life has to offer can never be known just by reading books.
At the end of my first year, gazing out at the empty quad at Trinity College, I scribbled out a simple haiku:
The year nears its end.
I don’t know if I should feel
Delighted? Distraught?
This was (and remains) a childish poem. But the sentiment I expressed back then speaks to me now more than ever.
Great writing….
Marina’s Dad 😊