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.