by Hannah Schultz, Executive Editor
At midnight on the final day of production for The Year in Review, I was tasked with finding a quote for the last page of the publication. We decided we needed something inspiring, something that graduating seniors would bear with them like a charge. As I thought back to the millions of words that have affected me as a journalist, a reader and a creative writer over the past four years, a memoir I read for my creative nonfiction class came to mind.
“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can,” Beryl Markham writes in West With the Night. “Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it.”
We didn’t use this particular quote in The Year in Review, but it has nonetheless stayed with me during these last fleeting moments of my undergraduate career. And now, as I try to write my senior farewell to the newspaper that has given me so much for all these years, Markham’s words have come back to me.
It would be all too easy for me to spend my final days as executive editor looking back at all I have accomplished, from a naïve staff writer my freshman year, to where I am today. It would be all too easy for me to spend them looking back at all we have accomplished as a team, from a three-hour, nonstop election live stream, to an unprecedented keepsake magazine. It would be all too easy for me to spend them looking back at being surrounded by talented, wildly intelligent, gracious, hilarious people and having the honor of being their leader.
It would be all too easy to take all of these moments and use them as the comparison for the next years of my life — to remember them and miss them often, to wish I could live in this moment longer and draw out the ending.
But this is a place that I have lived in and loved and where all my yesteryears are buried deep, so I must leave it as fast as I can. It’s time for a new chapter, a new set of invaluable memories, a new place to live in and love that will one day be just as hard to leave.
Thank you to the dearly departed — to Florida — David Wheeler for seeing talent in a timid freshman. Thank you to Professor Greg Bandy, Robin Gericke, Kaiser Shaffer and the rest of my design and editorial team for the best end to four years on the Collegian. Thank you to my journalism and creative writing professors for four years worth of notes, exams and destroyed printing balances. And thank you to Asbury for being a place I must leave in the fastest way I can.
