A Separate Peace

by John Knowles

So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all—plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.

“Is that what you like best?” I said sarcastically. I said a lot of things sarcastically that summer; that was my sarcastic summer, 1942.

But there was another reason. I think we reminded them of what peace was like, we boys of sixteen.

We were careless and wild, and I suppose we could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve.

He had gotten away with everything. I felt a sudden stab of disappointment. That was because I just wanted to see some

It was quite a compliment to me, as a matter of fact, to have such a person choose me for his best friend.

It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.

The people in the world who could be selfish in the summer of 1942 were a small band, and I’m glad we took advantage of it.

Exposing a sincere emotion nakedly like that at the Devon School was the next thing to suicide. I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.

If you broke the rules, then they broke you. That, I think, was the real point of the sermon on this first morning.

“The next time you call anybody maimed,” I bit off the words harshly so he would understand all of them, “you better make sure they are first.”

There was nothing idiosyncratic about Brinker unless you saw him from behind; I did as he turned to close the door after him. The flaps of his gabardine jacket parted slightly over his healthy rump, 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.

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.

I thought it anything but a bad smell. 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.

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

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

Because 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.

All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way—if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.