A Separate Peace

by John Knowles

mordantly

I know you.” “Don’t be stupid. I wouldn’t waste my time on anything like that.” “You never waste your time. That’s why I have to do it for you.”

He gave me that half-smile of his, which had won him a thousand conflicts.

The thought was, You and Phineas are even already. You are even in enmity.

You are both coldly driving ahead for yourselves alone.

Candide

Voltaire and Molière and the laws of motion and the Magna Carta and the Pathetic Fallacy and Tess of the d’Urbervilles—

effulgence

No one cared, no one exercised any real discipline over us; we were on our own.

and I continued to attend, because I didn’t want Finny to understand me as I understood him.

Because it was what you had in your heart that counted. And I had detected that Finny’s was a den of lonely, selfish ambition.

What he meant was clear enough, but I was groping for what lay behind his words, for what his thoughts could possibly be.

I might have asked, “Who are you, then?” instead. I was facing a total stranger.

It seemed that he had made some kind of parallel between my studies and his sports. He probably thought anything you were good at came without effort. He didn’t know yet that he was unique.

“I know. We kid around a lot and everything, but you have to be serious sometime, about something.

I said nothing, my mind exploring the new dimensions of isolation around me. Any fear I had ever had of the tree was nothing beside this.

It wasn’t my neck, but my understanding which was menaced.

He had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have...

I was not of the same qua...

None of this mattered now; I would have listlessly agreed to anything.

“Come out a little way,” he said, “and then we’ll jump side by side.”

With unthinking sureness I moved out on the limb and jumped into the river, every trace of my fear of this forgotten.

Out of my hearing people must have talked of other things, but everyone talked about Phineas to me. I suppose this was only natural.

one of the few young men who could be free and happy in the summer of 1942.

But there was nothing. No one suspected. Phineas must still be too sick, or too noble, to tell them.

raises the question of whether it was an accident.

I decided to put on his clothes.

the wide cuffs touching my wrists, the rich material against my skin excited a sense of strangeness and distinction; I felt like some nobleman, some Spanish grandee.

He wanted especially to see you. You were the one person he asked for.”

“Come on in,” I heard him say. “You look worse than I do.” The fact that he could still make a light remark pulled me back a little, and I went to a chair beside his bed.

I thought I could reach out and get hold of you.”

I flinched violently away from him. “To drag me down too!” He kept looking vaguely over my face. “To get hold of you, so I wouldn’t fall off.”

Very shocked, like you have right now.”

guilt? anger?

“Yes, I know. I remember it all.”

There was a hard block of silence, and then I said quietly, as though my words might detonate the room, “Do you remember what made you fall?”

I did have this idea, this feeling that when you were standing there beside me, y—I don’t know, I had a kind of feeling.

But you can’t say anything for sure from just feelings.

“I’m sorry about that feeling I had.”

I couldn’t say anything to this sincere, drugged apology for having suspected the truth.

And I thought we were competitors! It was so ludicrous I wanted to cry.

The next day the doctor decided that Finny was not yet well enough to see visitors, even old pals like me. Soon after he was taken in an ambulance to his home outside Boston.

this reads, given everything that came before it, like a purposeful interruption of an admission of love

But to me it seemed irresolutely suspended, halted strangely before its time.

instead of that I sat back in the seat and heard myself give the address of Finny’s house on the outskirts.

“I’ll send you something. Flowers or something.” “Flowers! What happened to you in Dixie anyway?”

How was I going to begin talking about it? It would not be just a thunderbolt. It wouldn’t even seem real.

It was a compromise of a room, with a few good “pieces” for guests to look at, and the rest of it for people to use.

In the room we shared at Devon many strangers had lived before us, and many would afterward. It was there that I had done it, but it was here that I would have to tell it.

I’m tired and you make me sick.

Could it be that he might even be right? Had I really and definitely and knowingly done it to him after all? I couldn’t remember, I couldn’t think.

As I had to do whenever I glimpsed this river, I thought of Phineas.

Phineas in exaltation, balancing on one foot on the prow of a canoe like a river god, his raised arms invoking the air to support him, face transfigured,