Saturday, March 13, 2021

Saturday Morning at the Library

 

A Separate Peace
John Knowles

When I was 5 years old, I was forced to take dancing lessons while the Brother was forced to take accordion lessons. I hated dancing class. The Knights of Columbus Hall where the classes were given had no heat or it wasn't turned on. I hated wearing the pink beginner tights. I liked clacking around in the tap shoes, but Ma wouldn't let me practice inside the house on the wood floors. I spent most of my time in class being miserable and crying. Eventually, I was taken out of class.

While the Brother still had to endure accordion lessons, Dad took me to the library. He would leave me upstairs in the children's library where I could look at the books and choose to take some books home with my own library card. As I got older, I would go downstairs to the adult library and wander among the stacks enjoying the scent of the books before going to find Dad in the reference area consulting the law books and catching up on his work.

So for the next several weeks, a list of my favorite books, some I have read as a child, others as an adult and some  I have read more than once.

Chapter 1
I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was
a student there fifteen years before. It seemed more sedate than I remembered it, more
perpendicular and strait-laced, with narrower windows and shinier woodwork, as though a coat
of varnish had been put over everything for better preservation. But, of course, fifteen years
before there had been a war going on. Perhaps the school wasn’t as well kept up in those days;
perhaps varnish, along with everything else, had gone to war.

I didn’t entirely like this glossy new surface, because it made the school look like a museum, and
that’s exactly what it was to me, and what I did not want it to be. In the deep, tacit way in which
feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that 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 hadn’t even known 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 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.

There were a couple of places now which I wanted to see. Both were fearful sites, and that was
why I wanted to see them. So after lunch at the Devon Inn I walked back toward the school. It
was a raw, nondescript time of year, toward the end of November, the kind of wet, self-pitying
November day when every speck of dirt stands out clearly. Devon luckily had very little of such
weather—the icy clamp of winter, or the radiant New Hampshire summers, were more
characteristic of it—but this day it blew wet, moody gusts all around me.
I walked along Gilman Street, the best street in town. The houses were as handsome and as
unusual as I remembered. Clever modernizations of old Colonial manses, extensions in Victorian
wood, capacious Greek Revival temples lined the street, as impressive and just as forbidding as
ever. I had rarely seen anyone go into one of them, or anyone playing on a lawn, or even an open
window. Today with their failing ivy and stripped, moaning trees the houses looked both more
elegant and more lifeless than ever.

You can find this book and others at your public library.

15 comments:

  1. I don't know this book. I just looked it up on Amazon. I like the idea that it is set in New England. I'm popping it on my wish list. The wind is pretty bad here today. Stay warm. Old man winter is being stubborn this year.

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    1. It's a coming of age story and I was surprised to learn it's been banned in some place.

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  2. I know we had to read it in HS but I don't remember a thing about it. :-/

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    1. Yeah, I have a few books like that from HS. Forced reads and not memorable.

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  3. until you mentioned accordion, i forgot we had one. We didn't take lessons but somehow it was at our house and i don't know who it belonged to . we had a baby grand which my dad and sis took lessons. my mom could play by ear. I tried but couldn't read the lessons but i could play songs by ear, nothing spectacular though

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    1. I took piano lessons as an adult for a few years. I could play a few tunes, but nothing special

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  4. I remember this from when I read it long ages ago, but I never re-read it.

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    1. I think I got nostalgic for the high school English class teacher and re-read it.

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  5. My brother had to take accordion and I was taking dance too! LOL! I actually liked to dance, but I wanted to do my own thing! LOL! This book sounds really good! Thanks CJ!

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    1. I wanted to do my own thing, too, but dancing wasn't it 😺

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  6. I also think I read this in high school. It certainly didn't stand out for me, though.

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  7. Not a book I know ...

    All the best Jan

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