A Separate Peace

by John Knowles

I myself took no action. I didn’t feel free to, and I didn’t know why this was so.

I felt my face grimacing in the way Finny’s did when he was really irritated.

Caesar he believed to be more of a tyrant at Devon than he had ever been in Rome.

“Naturally I don’t believe books and I don’t believe teachers,” he came across a few paces, “but I do believe—it’s important after all for me to believe you.

Christ, I’ve got to believe you, at least. I know you better than anybody.”

That’s the word, we might as well admit it. Leper’s gone crazy. When I heard that about Leper, then I knew that the war was real, this war and all the wars. If a war can drive somebody crazy, then it’s real all right.

“To tell you the truth, I wasn’t too completely sure about you, when you told me how Leper was. Of course I believed you,”

he added hurriedly, “but you’re the nervous type, you know, and I thought maybe your imagination got a little inflamed up there in Vermont.

I thought he might not be quite as mixed up a...

“You had better balance than anyone in the school.” “Thanks a lot.” “I didn’t say it for a compliment.” “Well then, no thanks.”

He carefully wrapped it around Phineas. I would have liked very much to have done that myself; it would have meant a lot to me.

Everyone behaved with complete presence of mind, and that included Phineas.

Once again I had the desolating sense of having all along ignored what was finest in him.

I knew that normally I would have been one of those carrying the chair, saying something into his ear as we went along.

My aid alone had never seemed to him in the category of help. The reason for this occurred to me as the procession moved slowly across the brilliant foyer to the doors; Phineas had thought of me as an extension of himself.

I idly considered stealing it, in the way that people idly consider many crimes it would be possible for them to commit.

I took an academic interest in the thought of stealing the car, knowing all the time that it would be not so much criminal as meaningless,

There was a wartime phrase coming into style just then—“this is it”—and although it later became a parody of itself, it had a final flat accuracy which was all that could be said at certain times. This was one of the times: this was it.

He had a particular expression which his face assumed when he understood but didn’t think he should show it, a settled, enlightened look; its appearance now was the first decent thing I had seen in a long time.

Le bourgeois gentilhomme.

I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.

bellicose-looking;

None of them ever accused me of being responsible for what had happened to Phineas, either because they could not believe it or else because they could not understand it.

cogitation

“I’m going to ‘serve’ as he puts it, I may even get killed. But I’ll be damned if I’ll have that Nathan Hale attitude of his about it.

It’s all that World War I malarkey that gets me. They’re all children about that war, did you never notice?”

“It gives me a pain, personally. I’m not any kind of hero, and neither are you. And neither is th...

“He’s just trying to keep up with the times. He probably feels left out, being too old this time.”

“Left out!” Brinker’s eyes lighted up. “Left out! He and his crowd are responsible for it! And we’re going to fight it!”

it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.

Happiness had disappeared along with rubber, silk, and many other staples, to be replaced by the wartime synthetic, high morale, for the Duration.

My fury was gone, I felt it gone, dried up at the source, withered and lifeless. Phineas had absorbed it and taken it with him, and I was rid of it forever.

Such is the double life of all great literature—there is what it is meant to mean, and then there is what it means to any given reader because of what that reader brings to it, and the time (and age) at which that reader encounters it.

But when it comes to what the story means to me, so much of what Knowles writes gets to the heart of what it would have been like to be gay at that time—and what it can still be like to be gay now.