Enemy Within

His face had been struggling to stay calm as he listened to me, but now he was crying but trying to control himself. "It was just some kind of blind impulse you had in the tree there, you didn't know what you were doing. Was that it?"

"Yes, yes, that was it. Oh that was it, but how can you believe that? How can you believe that? I can't even make myself pretend that you could believe that."

"I do. I think I can believe that. I've gotten awfully mad sometimes and almost forgotten what I was doing. I think I believe you, I think I can believe that. Then that was it. Something just seized you. It wasn't anything you really felt against me, it wasn't some kind of hate you've felt all along. It wasn't anything personal."

"No, I don't know how to show you, how can I show you, Finny? Tell me how to show it to you. It was just some ignorance inside me, some crazy thing inside me, something blind, that's all it was."

--John Knowles, A Separate Peace

Life imitates art. Friday morning, shortly after midnight, two 23-year-old friends were prowling around the edge of a Pennsylvania strip mine. One of them, Nathan Bowman, somehow fell some 500 feet into the pit. His buddy called 911. The boy had miraculously survived the fall, national news media reported, and had been rescued by fire department personnel, suffering only broken bones. He remembered nothing about the fall.

Today, his friend was under arrest, having broken down and admitted to shoving Bowman into the hole.

We don't know the details. Apparently there had been an argument. Probably something trivial, nothing that in a saner moment would have caused such a potentially homicidal act.

What causes such attacks? Alcohol? Temporary insanity? Poor impulse control? These are the easy, superficial answers. In his high school literature classic, Knowles reminds us that there is something not quite right about the best of us, something that leads to betrayals, to fights, to murders, and to wars. Something irrational, something that can result in horrific consequences completely out of proportion to any apparent provocation. Consequences that we regret with all our hearts the instant the deed's been done.

In A Separate Peace, Phineas's seeming perfection grated increasingly on the nerves of his best friend. In one fatal instant, without forethought, Gene wiggled a tree limb just enough to cause Finny to fall, to break his leg, eventually to die. Maybe something similar happened in the dark of night, high on the rim of a Pennsylvania strip mine. Maybe the push was the end product of a gradual, unconscious unraveling of friendship, a sudden eruption into action of previously unrecognized hostility. (Or maybe two idiots just got in a fight and one pushed the other over the edge.) We just don't know.

Finny was able to comprehend, accept and forgive Gene's secret frustrations with his own weaknesses, frustrations that he irrationally and violently directed outward, directed against his friend, against Finny, against the boy whom Gene did, in fact, consider his very best friend. From that episode, and from Finny's resulting death, Gene drew insights into the complexity of human relationships, and an understanding of the tiny coil of irrationality buried deep within each of us, a tiny coiled knot of ignorance that makes peace so difficult -- peace with ourselves, peace between friends, and peace among nations.

I never killed anybody [as a soldier in World War II] and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform. I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there.

We like to think that this event will lead to similar insights for the two young Pennsylvanians. But although life may imitate art, life isn't art. Life provides no wise narrator to explain to the two young men the moral of that shove into the strip mine. The two friends receive only the cold gaze of the media, and the cold logic of the police.

In today's world, Gene would not have been allowed his philosophical ruminations undisturbed. He would have been held in lieu of bail, and charged with aggravated assault. Such indeed will be the fate of Nathan Bowman's friend and assailant. Philosophical insights and a deeper friendship between the two are also possible, of course. But significantly less likely. Like the schoolyard fight that ends in eternal friendship between the protagonists -- those are outcomes most apt to be found in books.