A Separate Peace

by John Knowles

In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day I entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left.

This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but that they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pigmies while you were looking the other way.

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.

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.

It was hypnotism. I was beginning to see that Phineas could get away with anything. I couldn’t help envying him that a little, which was perfectly normal. There was no harm in envying even your best friend a little.

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

Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.

“You never waste your time. That’s why I have to do it for you.”

You know what? I’m almost glad this war came along. It’s like a test, isn’t it, and only the things and the people who’ve been evolving the right way survive.”

It wasn’t the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace.

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

I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend’s shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.