A_Separate_Peace_-_Full_Text

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Yes, he had practically saved my life. He had also practically lost it for me. I wouldn't have
been on that damn limb except for him. I wouldn't have turned around, and so lost my balance,
if he hadn't been there. I didn't need to feel any tremendous rush of gratitude toward Phineas.
The Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session was a success from the start. That night
Finny began to talk abstractedly about it, as though it were a venerable, entrenched institution
of the Devon School. The half-dozen friends who were there in our room listening began to
bring up small questions on details without ever quite saying that they had never heard of such
a club. Schools are supposed to be catacombed with secret societies and underground
brotherhoods, and as far as they knew here was one which had just come to the surface. They
signed up as "trainees" on the spot.
We began to meet every night to initiate them. The Charter Members, he and I, had to open
every meeting by jumping ourselves. This was the first of the many rules which Finny created
without notice during the summer. I hated it. I never got inured to the jumping. At every
meeting the limb seemed higher, thinner, the deeper water harder to reach. Every time, when I
got myself into position to jump, I felt a flash of disbelief that I was doing anything so perilous.
But I always jumped. Otherwise I would have lost face with Phineas, and that would have been
unthinkable.
We met every night, because Finny's life was ruled by inspiration and anarchy, and so he
prized a set of rules. His own, not those imposed on him by other people, such as the faculty of
the Devon School. The Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session was a club; clubs by
definition met regularly; we met every night. Nothing could be more regular than that. To meet
once a week seemed to him much less regular, entirely too haphazard, bordering on
carelessness.
I went along; I never missed a meeting. At that time it would never have occurred to me to
say, "I don't feel like it tonight," which was the plain truth every night. I was subject to the
dictates of my mind, which gave me the maneuverability of a strait jacket. "We're off, pal,"
Finny would call out, and acting against every instinct of my nature, I went without a thought
of protest.
As we drifted on through the summer, with this one inflexible appointment every day—
classes could be cut, meals missed, Chapel skipped—I noticed something about Finny's own
mind, which was such an opposite from mine. It wasn't completely unleashed after all. I
noticed that he did abide by certain rules, which he seemed to cast in the form of
Commandments. "Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half" was
the first one I encountered. Another was, "Always say some prayers at night because it might
turn out that there is a God."