#like its literally key to understanding phineas and gene's dynamic and both of their characters and just

[finny-propaganda]

One of my favorite scenes from A Separate Peace, taken from chapter four:

A French examination was announced for one Friday late in August. Finny and I studied for it in the library Thursday afternoon; I went over vocabulary lists, and he wrote messages—je ne give a damn pas about le francais, les filles en France ne wear pas les pantelons—and passed them with great seriousness to me, as aide-mémoire. Of course I didn’t get any work done. After supper I went to our room to try again. Phineas came in a couple of minutes later.

“Arise,” he began airily, “Senior Overseer Charter Member! Elwin ‘Leper’ Lepellier has announced his intention to make the leap this very night, to qualify, to save his face at last.”

I didn’t believe it for a second. Leper Lepellier would go down paralyzed with panic on any sinking troopship before making such a jump. Finny had put him up to it, to finish me for good on the exam. I turned around with elaborate resignation. “If he jumps out of that tree I’m Mahatma Gandhi.”

“All right,” agreed Finny absently. He had a way of turning cliches inside out like that. “Come on, let’s go. We’ve got to be there. You never know, maybe he will do it this time.”

“Oh, for God sake.” I slammed closed the French book.

“What’s the matter?”

What a performance! His face was completely questioning and candid.

“Studying!” I snarled. “Studying! You know, books. Work. Examinations.”

“Yeah ...” He waited for me to go on, as though he didn’t see what I was getting at.

“Oh for God sake! You don’t know what I’m talking about. No, of course not. Not you.” I stood up and slammed the chair against the desk. “Okay, we go. We watch little lily-liver Lepellier not jump from the tree, and I ruin my grade.”

He looked at me with an interested, surprised expression. “You want to study?”

I began to feel a little uneasy at this mildness of his, so I sighed heavily. “Never mind, forget it. I know, I joined the club, I’m going. What else can I do?”

“Don’t go.” He said it very simply and casually, as though he were saying, “Nice day.” He shrugged, “Don’t go. What the hell, it’s only a game.”

I had stopped halfway across the room, and now I just looked at him. “What d’you mean?” I muttered. What he meant was clear enough, but I was groping for what lay behind his words, for what his thoughts could possibly be. I might have asked, “Who are you, then?” instead. I was facing a total stranger.

“I didn’t know you needed to study,” he said simply, “I didn’t think you ever did. I thought it just came to you.”

It seemed that he had made some kind of parallel between my studies and his sports. He probably thought anything you were good at came without effort. He didn’t know yet that he was unique.

I couldn’t quite achieve a normal speaking voice. “If I need to study, then so do you.”

“Me?” He smiled faintly. “Listen, I could study forever and I’d never break C. But it’s different for you, you’re good. You really are. If I had a brain like that, I’d—I’d have my head cut open so people could look at it.”

“Now wait a second ...”

He put his hands on the back of a chair and leaned toward me. “I know. We kid around a lot and everything, but you have to be serious sometime, about something. If you’re really good at something, I mean if there’s nobody, or hardly anybody, who’s as good as you are, then you’ve got to be serious about that. Don’t mess around, for God’s sake.” He frowned disapprovingly at me. “Why didn’t you say you had to study before? Don’t move from that desk. It’s going to be all A’s for you.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, without any reason.

“It’s okay. I’ll oversee old Leper. I know he’s not going to do it.” He was at the door.

“Wait a minute,” I said more sharply. “Wait just a minute. I’m coming.”

“No you aren’t, pal, you’re going to study.”

“Never mind my studying.”

“You think you’ve done enough already?”

“Yes.” I let this drop curtly to bar him from telling me what to do about my work. He let it go at that, and went out the door ahead of me, whistling off key.