A Separate Peace

by John Knowles

body a complex set of balances and compensations, each muscle aligned in perfection with all the others to maintain th...

his skin glowing from immersions, his whole body hanging between river and sky as though he had transcended gravity and might by gently pushing upward with his foot glide a ...

encompassing all the glory of the summer and offeri...

I stopped in the middle of this hurrying day to remember him like that, and then, feeling refreshed,

bantam

he knew nothing of the gypsy summer, nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure,

I didn’t know why for an instant; it was almost as though I were maimed. Then the realization that there was someone who was flashed over me.

But it didn’t feel exactly as though I had done it for Phineas. It felt as though I had done it for myself.

rarely entered except for a reprimand—I saw on the pad not an operator’s number from my home town, but one which seemed to interrupt the beating of my heart.

and I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.

and it is that, without any sense of derision at all, that I recall as Brinker’s salient characteristic, those healthy, determined, not over-exaggerated but definite and substantial buttocks.

WHICH COULD MEAN NOTHING??????

He grinned confidingly and sank down on my cot, leaning on his elbow in a relaxed, at-home way.

contretemps

He had a very weak foothold among the Butt Room crowd, and I had pretty well pushed him off it.

“Funny, he came all the way down here and didn’t even have a smoke.”

But this was a clue they soon seemed to forget.

“You can break a leg with that downhill stuff.”

Oh you see a lot of trees shoot by, but you never get to really look at trees, at a tree.

It was a night made for hard thoughts.

Sharp stars pierced singly through the blackness, not sweeps of them or clusters or Milky Ways as there might have been in the South, but single, chilled points of light, as unromantic as knife blades.

familiar ears

Everything that had happened throughout the day faded like that first false snowfall of the winter. Phineas was back.

I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of the night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.

His large and clear eyes turned with an odd expression on me. I had never seen such a look in them before.

“I can manage all right,” Finny repeated with a set face.

opposite Gene’s belief the night before, and/or opposite his acceptance of Gene’s help

Phineas was shocked at the idea of my leaving. In some way he needed me. He needed me.

But Finny hadn’t heard that. His face had broken into a wide and dazzled smile at what I had said, lighting up his whole face.

I have never since forgotten the dazed look on Finny’s face when he thought that on the first day of his return to Devon I was going to desert him.

I didn’t know why he had chosen me, why it was only to me that he could show the most humbling sides of his handicap. I didn’t care.

peace had come back to Devon for me.

I had simply ducked, that was all, and the wave’s concentrated power had hurtled harmlessly overhead, no doubt throwing others roughly up on the beach, but leaving me peaceably treading water as before.

What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.”

Phineas was a poor deceiver, having had no practice.

It was preeminently the smell of the human body after it had been used to the limit, such a smell as has meaning and poignance for any athlete, just as it has for any lover.

Neither of us ever mentioned it again, and neither of us ever forgot that it was there.

He wouldn’t have mentioned it except that after what he had said he had to say something very personal, something deeply held.

“Yes, I guess I have been.” “You didn’t even know anything about yourself.” “I don’t guess I did, in a way.”

What deceived me was my own happiness; for peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me. So I ceased to have any real sense of it.

vagaries,

He drew me increasingly away from the Butt Room crowd, away from Brinker and Chet and all other friends, into a world inhabited by just himself and me,

winter itself, an old, corrupt, tired conqueror,

multifariously

I and my year—not “my generation” for destiny now cut too finely for that old phrase—I and those of my year were preeminently eligible for that.

how am I supposed to answer that? I know what’s normal in the army, that’s all.” “Normal,” he repeated bitterly. “What a stupid-ass word that is.

“You always were a lord of the manor, weren’t you? A swell guy, except when the chips were down. You always were a savage underneath.

Like a savage underneath. Like,” now there was the blind confusion in his eyes again, a wild slyness around his mouth, “like that time you knocked Finny out of the tree.” I sprang out of the chair. “You stupid crazy bastard—” Still laughing, “Like that time you crippled him for life.”

And I did stay. Sometimes you are too ashamed to leave.

I didn’t want to hear any more of it. Not now or ever. I didn’t care because it had nothing to do with me. And I didn’t want to hear any more of it. Ever.

I wanted to see Phineas, and Phineas only.

Everywhere there was the smell of vitality in clothes, the vital something in wool and flannel and corduroy which spring releases.