A Separate Peace.pdf - Southwest High School

107and it wasn't. There was something innately strange about it, as though there had always beenan inner core to the gym which I had never perceived before, quite different from its generallyaccepted appearance. It seemed to alter moment by moment before my eyes, becoming forbrief flashes a totally unknown building with a significance much deeper and far more real thanany I had noticed before. The same was true of the water hole, where unauthorized games ofhockey were played during the winter. The ice was breaking up on it now, with just a fewglazed islands of ice remaining in the center and a fringe of hard surface glinting along thebanks. The old trees surrounding it all were intensely meaningful, with a message that was verypressing and entirely indecipherable. Here the road turned to the left and became dirt. Itproceeded along the lower end of the playing fields, and under the pale night glow the playingfields swept away from me in slight frosty undulations which bespoke meanings uponmeanings, levels of reality I had never suspected before, a kind of thronging and epic grandeurwhich my superficial eyes and cluttered mind had been blind to before. They unrolled awayimpervious to me as though I were a roaming ghost, not only tonight but always, as though Ihad never played on them a hundred times, as though my feet had never touched them, asthough my whole life at Devon had been a dream, or rather that everything at Devon, theplaying fields, the gym, the water hole, and all the other buildings and all the people there wereintensely real, wildly alive and totally meaningful, and I alone was a dream, a figment whichhad never really touched anything. I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be aliving part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.I reached the bridge which arches over the little Devon River and beyond it the dirt trackwhich curves toward the stadium. The stadium itself, two white concrete banks of seats, was aspowerful and alien to me as an Aztec ruin, filled with the traces of vanished people andvanished rites, of supreme emotions and supreme tragedies. The old phrase about "If thesewalls could only speak" occurred to me and I felt it more deeply than anyone has ever felt it, Ifelt that the stadium could not only speak but that its words could hold me spellbound. In factthe stadium did speak powerfully and at all times, including this moment. But I could not hear,and that was because I did not exist.I awoke the next morning in a dry and fairly sheltered corner of the ramp underneath thestadium. My neck was stiff from sleeping in an awkward position. The sun was high and the airfreshened.I walked back to the center of the school and had breakfast and then went to my room to geta notebook, because this was Wednesday and I had a class at 9:10. But at the door of the room Ifound a note from Dr. Stanpole. "Please bring some of Finny's clothes and his toilet things tothe Infirmary."I took his suitcase from the corner where it had been accumulating dust and put what hewould need into it. I didn't know what I was going to say at the Infirmary. I couldn't escape aconfusing sense of having lived through all of this before—Phineas in the Infirmary, andmyself responsible. I seemed to be less shocked by it now than I had the first time last August,when it had broken over our heads like a thunderclap in a flawless sky. There were hints ofmuch worse things around us now like a faint odor in the air, evoked by words like "plasma"