A Separate Peace
It’s no secret that there are many echoes between the “Devon School” portrayed in John Knowles’ A Separate Peace and Exeter, with the fabled tree jumping and the remains of similar activities our own rope swings. The parallels don’t end there. World War I rages beyond the walls of Devon, but within, the boys find a “separate peace,” a world of their own. The same is easy to see in “the Exeter bubble” as we know it now: sheltered from the outside world, ISIS, inequities and all. If there is a fine line between respite and isolation quarters, it is often blurred.The idea of “a separate peace” never occurred to me as the center of the novel until, at the end of my senior year, a PG in my dorm, Alex, asked me if I understood what was meant by the phrase. I realized that by the time I read the novel, the summer after my prep year, I knew exactly what Knowles had been writing of, just as I recognized the half-moon grooves that mar the Academy Building stairs. What makes Exeter beautiful, in part, is how idyllic it is, that the daily mundane things that are almost always avoidable: shoveling, cooking, washing dishes, landscaping, laundry, small talk, family affairs. Current events are mostly reduced to headlines, and an upward swipe can rid them from one’s conscience easily. And admittedly, having not to think about much does make it easier to focus on the grind, purpose and college admissions game.But it was not until I thought more carefully about “separate peace,” at least what that has meant to me as an Exonian now, in 2015, that I see also how disgusting it is in practice. If the daily mundane and the outside world are dismissed so easily, yes, we can focus on individual success. “Non sibi” and “Goodness with Knowledge”—these are phrases that attempt to fight the downsides of “a separate peace” but to no avail. I see myself embrace “a separate peace” in the ugliest of ways when I don’t pick up phone calls from my parents, or shirk friend duties, or when it takes me a full two days to figure out what has happened in Baltimore. And what of it? Maybe I have done my homework, made some personal gains here and there, but is that what it means to be an Exonian? I hope not. So lose yourself in the woods, and in your work, but lend yourself to the mundane as much as the intellectual. I hope, as I begin at anew in another bubble, to think of conversations about the news and about what’s going on at home as warding off nearsightedness. If something looks beautiful, but you aren’t looking carefully, what is it?