Lately I’ve been trying to read the books of the High School Canon* that I missed during my own education (which isn’t really that much of an endeavor, the High School Canon is distressingly limited), so that I won’t have to do too much catch-up work once I get my first teaching job. Right now I’m on A Separate Peace by John Knowles, which I’ve heard quiet a lot of complaint about, but I like it a lot. Knowles only explores two characters and one very small and specific setting, but he describes them in such precise and sturdy detail, both physically and psychologically, that it all feels much more real than so many other things I’ve read. Sure, maybe we shouldn’t be teaching too many books like it, given that I’m halfway through and the only women who appear are the headmaster’s wife and a maid (both of whom disappear after less than a page), but so long as other texts in the curriculum show a different slice of experience, I think this one is a fine addition.
In the middle of the beginning, when Knowles is taking his time setting up the world as it is, the narrator, Gene, goes on a long reflection on how he remembers the United States during World War Two. In his recollection, everything was rationed, every young man is thought of as a future soldier, foreign travel is unimaginable for any purpose but war, and “There are just tiny fragments of pleasure and luxury in the world, and there is something unpatriotic about enjoying them.” It’s a very evocative passage, the kind that could never be written except by someone who lived through an era personally. And when I first read it, I couldn’t help comparing it to the present moment, beat by beat.
I’m probably not the first person to make this comparison, but a pandemic seems like both a natural parallel and opposite to a war. In each there is a looming threat of death hanging over certain parts of the population. In each a society’s resources suddenly concentrate in one specific area. In each we read the news obsessively, trusting experts to inform us on trends far too big for us to observe from home and instruct us on how best to protect ourselves and serve our community. But there are also clear points of contrast. While wars prey on the young and fit, the pandemic has attacked the old and most vulnerable. War drove us to all kinds of action, from military service to victory gardens, while the best defense against the pandemic seems to be lonely passivity. And I don’t see much of the patriotic unity in the fight against COVID that most sources recount from World War Two, though that’s less of an inherent part of the situation and more an effect of our dysfunctional government.
Being in a constant English teacher mindset these days, when I read this section, I immediately though that it would be a good assignment for students to write something in a similar style but about our current situation. And, even though I’ll never use that assignment (because by the time I start teaching there won’t be an international crisis anymore, I hope), I still tried it out myself to see how it would work.
The answer is: not well. Most of it was too vague to present any clear imagery or emotion. The only evocative sentences were pulled directly and awkwardly from the text: Knowles wrote “The prevailing color in American life is a dull, dark green called olive drab,” I wrote “The prevailing color in American life is the pale blue of a surgical mask” (which isn’t even true; most people who care enough to wear a mask care enough to wear a double-cloth one). But the real problem was that none of what I wrote could be certain. I wrote the death count I remembered hearing last, then looked it up and replaced it with the updated number, then took it out entirely because it was sure to climb much higher. In the same way, I flip-flopped over whether to put in anything about a national mask mandate, since Biden is sure to implement one if he wins the presidency, but that victory is far from certain. I couldn’t write anything about how long it would last, except that it was much longer than anyone would admit at first. I couldn’t even make any generalizations about how it changed people’s lives, because there are plenty of people who have refused to let it change their lives at all (to disastrous consequences, of course).
I guess World War Two is essentially different for Knowles and his narrator than COVID is for me. The novel came out in 1959 and the story is told by Gene fourteen years after the fact. Both are looking backward. And no one can remember or construct the past exactly as it was, because you can’t force yourself to forget how all the unresolved tensions finally settled. If the Americans had lost the war, would Gene have focused so much on the hardships of the time when describing the era? Personally, I think he would’ve focused more on the pain to come. It works on the personal level too: the nostalgic memory of Phineas is undoubtedly shaped by the tragedy that meets him later.
Maybe I was so fixated on applying that sort of detached view of the past to our present situation because I really want to have that kind of certainty. This is something I’ve written about before**, but what I find hardest about this situation is that no one can be certain about any part of it: how long it will last, how many will die or suffer, and if we can depend on a stable government to guide us through it at some point. But there’s no cure for this uncertainty, really. We can do our small parts to make the future we want to see, I guess, by voting and volunteering. But mostly, we just have to live and wait.
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* Defined as any book you’re almost guaranteed to find at least a hundred well-worn copies of in any high school English Department storage closet.
** Sorry to post about this so often. I've just been thinking about it so obsessively lately that there isn't that much else I can write about.
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