A_Separate_Peace_-_Full_Text

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was weakened by the very genuineness of his interest in learning. He got carried away by
things; for example, he was so fascinated by the tilting planes of solid geometry that he did
almost as badly in trigonometry as I did myself. When we read Candide it opened up a new
way of looking at the world to Chet, and he continued hungrily reading Voltaire, in French,
while the class went on to other people. He was vulnerable there, because to me they were all
pretty much alike—Voltaire and Molière and the laws of motion and the Magna Carta and the
Pathetic Fallacy and Tess of the D'Urbervilles—and I worked indiscriminately on all of them.
Finny had no way of knowing this, because it all happened so far ahead of him
scholastically. In class he generally sat slouched in his chair, his alert face following the
discussion with an expression of philosophical comprehension, and when he was forced to
speak himself the hypnotic power of his voice combined with the singularity of his mind to
produce answers which were often not right but could rarely be branded as wrong. Written tests
were his downfall because he could not speak them, and as a result he got grades which were
barely passing. It wasn't that he never worked, because he did work, in short, intense bouts now
and then. As that crucial summer wore on and I tightened the discipline on myself Phineas
increased his bouts of studying.
I could see through that. I was more and more certainly becoming the best student in the
school; Phineas was without question the best athlete, so in that way we were even. But while
he was a very poor student I was a pretty good athlete, and when everything was thrown into
the scales they would in the end tilt definitely toward me. The new attacks of studying were his
emergency measures to save himself. I redoubled my effort.
It was surprising how well we got along in these weeks. Sometimes I found it hard to
remember his treachery, sometimes I discovered myself thoughtlessly slipping back into
affection for him again. It was hard to remember when one summer day after another broke
with a cool effulgence over us, and there was a breath of widening life in the morning air—
something hard to describe—an oxygen intoxicant, a shining northern paganism, some odor,
some feeling so hopelessly promising that I would fall back in my bed on guard against it. It
was hard to remember in the heady and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I
hated and who hated me. I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable
promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too
much hate to be contained in a world like this.
Summer lazed on. No one paid any attention to us. One day I found myself describing to
Mr. Prud'homme how Phineas and I had slept on the beach, and he seemed to be quite
interested in it, in all the details, so much so that he missed the point; that we had flatly broken
a basic rule.
No one cared, no one exercised any real discipline over us; we were on our own.
August arrived with a deepening of all the summertime splendors of New Hampshire. Early
in the month we had two days of light, steady rain which aroused a final fullness everywhere.
The branches of the old trees, which had been familiar to me either half-denuded or completely
gaunt during the winter terms at Devon, now seemed about to break from their storms of