"A Separate Peace" by John Knowles, Chapters 1-3

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.

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.

It is the beauty of small areas of order — a large yard, a group of trees, three similar dormitories, a circle of old houses — living together in contentious harmony. You felt that an argument might begin again any time; in fact it had...

He of course saw nothing the slightest bit intimidating about it.

Standing on this limb, you could by a prodigious effort jump far enough out into the river for safety.

Naturally Finny was going to be the first to try, and just as naturally he was going to inveigle others, us, into trying it with him.

He weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, a galling ten pounds more than I did, which flowed from his legs to torso around shoulders to arms and full strong neck in an uninterrupted, unemphatic unity of strength.

Finny got up, patted my head genially, and moved on across the field, not deigning to glance around for my counterattack, but relying on his extrasensory ears, his ability to feel in the air someone coming on him from behind.

A streak of tolerance was detectable.

...Finny began to talk abstractedly about it, as though it were a venerable, entrenched institution of the Devon School.

I never got inured to the jumping.

...Finny’s life was ruled by inspiration and anarchy, and so he prized a set of rules. His own, not those imposed on him by other people, such as the faculty of the Devon School.

“Destroy us?” Humor infiltrated the outrage in his voice, which meant that he was thinking of a way out.

“Let’s make it have something to do with the war,” sug­gested Bobby Zane. “Like a blitzkrieg or something.”
“Blitzkrieg,” repeated Finny doubtfully.
“We could figure out some kind of blitzkrieg baseball,” I said.

Around us gleamed white tile and glass brick; the green, artificial-looking water rocked gently in its shining basin, releasing vague chemical smells and a sense of many pipes and filters; even Finny’s voice, trapped in this closed, high-ceilinged room, lost its special resonance and blurred into a general well of noise gathered up toward the ceiling.