A Separate Peace.pdf - Southwest High School

67"Leave your fantasy life out of this. We're grooming you for the Olympics, pal, in 1944."And not believing him, not forgetting that troops were being shuttled toward battlefields allover the world, I went along, as I always did, with any new invention of Finny's. There was noharm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.But since we were so far out of the line of fire, the chief sustenance for any sense of the warwas mental. We saw nothing real of it; all our impressions of the war were in the false mediumof two dimensions-photographs in the papers and magazines, newsreels, posters—or artificiallyconveyed to us by a voice on the radio, or headlines across the top of a newspaper. I found thatonly through a continuous use of the imagination could I hold out against Finny's drivingoffensive in favor of peace.And now when we were served chicken livers for dinner I couldn't help conceiving a mentalpicture of President Roosevelt and my father and Finny's father and numbers of other large oldmen sitting down to porterhouse steak in some elaborate but secluded men's secret societyroom. When a letter from home told me that a trip to visit relatives had been canceled becauseof gas rationing it was easy to visualize my father smiling silently with knowing eyes—at leastas easy as it was to imagine an American force crawling through the jungles of a place calledGuadalcanal—"Wherever that is," as Phineas said.And when in chapel day after day we were exhorted to new levels of self-deprivation andhard work, with the war as their justification, it was impossible not to see that the faculty wereusing this excuse to drive us as they had always wanted to drive us, regardless of any war orpeace.What a joke if Finny was right after all!But of course I didn't believe him. I was too well protected against the great fear of boys'school life, which is to be "taken in." Along with everyone else except a few professional gullssuch as Leper, I rejected anything which had the smallest possibility of doubt about it. So ofcourse I didn't believe him. But one day after our chaplain, Mr. Carhart, had become verymoved by his own sermon in chapel about God in the Foxholes, I came away thinking that ifFinny's opinion of the war was unreal, Mr. Carhart's was at least as unreal. But of course Ididn't believe him.And anyway I was too occupied to think about it all. In addition to my own work, I wasdividing my time between tutoring Finny in studies and being tutored by him in sports. Sinceso much of learning anything depends on the atmosphere in which it is taught Finny and I, toour joint double amazement, began to make flashing progress where we had been bumblersbefore.Mornings we got up at six to run. I dressed in a gym sweat suit with a towel tucked aroundmy throat, and Finny in pajamas, ski boots and his sheep-lined coat.A morning shortly before Christmas vacation brought my reward. I was to run the courseFinny had laid out, four times around an oval walk which circled the Headmaster's home, a