A Separate Peace
                       By John Knowles


   I never talked about Phineas and neither did anyone
else; he was, however, present in every moment of every day
since Dr.Stanpole had told me. Finny had a vitality which
could not be quenched so suddenly, even by the marrow of 
his bone. That was why I couldn't say anything or listen to 
anything about him, because he endured so forcefully that
what I had to say would have seemed crazy to anyone
else--I could not use the past tense, for instance-- and 
what they had to say would be incomprehensible to me.
During the time I was with him, Phineas created an atmos-
phere in which I continued to now live, a way of sizing up
the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, let-
ting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a 
little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate with-
out a sense of chaos and loss.


   No one else I ever met could do this. All others at 
some point found something in themselves pitted violently
against something in the world around them. With those
of my year this point often came when they grasped the
fact of the war. When they began to feel that there was this
overwhelmingly hostile thing in the world with them, then
the simplicity and unity of their characters broke and they
were not the same again.

 I chose this passage because Gene realizes something new.
He realizes that it's time for him to grow up and face that he
can no longer spend his time playing around. There is a war
going on and he knows that he has to accept the fact that he is
no longer a child. It seems to me that John Knowles almost
created Phineas and got rid of Phineas just to show how short
 the period of being a child is. It was as almost if Phineas was
a representation of Gene's childhood.