"In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt 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.
"Now here it was after all, preserved by some considerate hand with varnish and wax. Preserved along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I didn't even know it was there. Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify its presence.
"Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with great clarity the the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.
"I felt fear's echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its accompaniment and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like Northern Lights across black sky."
by John Knowles, 1959
1 comment:
'A Separate Peace' is a very well-written commentary on the evils of human nature. The first few pages are a bit tricky to get through, but once you do, the novel becomes quite interesting. It's the story of a complex friendship between two boys at a boarding school, during the Second World War. The novel has many strengths: it's not predictable, the characters are well-developed,it's haunting and while richly satisfying, it still leaves questions open for debate. I enjoyed the fact that although the narrator, Gene, was quite unlikable in some ways, I could identify with him to a certain extent.
Post a Comment