Finny and Gene: Doubt, Rivalry, and Intense Contingency
“‘. . . after all you can’t come to the shore with just anybody and you can’t come by yourself, and at this teen-age period in life the proper person is your best pal . . .’
“I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back.”
FINNY AND GENE, IN
A SEPARATE PEACE,
BY JOHN KNOWLES
At some point during my freshman year at Amherst—well before I met Seth—I was assigned to read John Knowles’s great coming-of-age novel, A Separate Peace. This now-classic novel turns out to be an exemplary case study of the opportunities and challenges of twinship—especially adolescent twinship. (If you’ve found yourself caught up in my descriptions of adolescent twinship, you might pick up a copy and study it.)
The novel is a powerful read. Here is the story, in brief: Gene Forrester (our protagonist) has returned for a visit to his old prep school, Devon School, the elite New England school from which he had graduated fifteen years earlier. As the novel opens, Gene is reentering this hallowed but conflicted ground. Devon had been the scene of the most intense friendship of his life—his friendship with a peer and rival, Phineas, or “Finny.” Gene and Finny’s friendship, as conjured up by John Knowles, is a classic story of the ways in which best friendships, especially early in life, are inevitably fraught not only with joy, ebullience, and wonder, but also with insecurity, doubt, rivalry, and envy. And it is a story, too—and most importantly—of the ways in which we can actually work these through. (Spoiler: We can work these through, yes, but only once we’ve found a reliable friend.)
Gene, who is the narrator of the novel, is very much indeed like myself at the same age: scrupulous, eager to do the right thing, often constrained by conformity, burdened with a distinctly sensitive and intellectual bent. Gene was often scared. But we, the reader, come to like and admire him, because, to his credit, he was always working against the fear. Underneath his careful, methodical exterior, Gene was longing to connect with his freer self. He was longing to meet, and join with, and be transformed by, someone like Finny—Finny, the handsome, cavalier, daring jock. Finny the risk taker, who was physically strong and courageous. Finny, who had so much courage that he displayed the ultimate courage for a boy his age: the courage to be tender.
Through the course of the novel, Gene and Finny’s love, trust, and fidelity deepen, largely as a result of a series of mutual risk-taking adventures organized around what they came to call “The Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session.” The Suicide Society was a classic young man’s trying grounds. It involved a risky game—jumping out of a high tree into a river—a game through which one could prove one’s courage to one’s pals.
I remember being mesmerized by the novel at my first reading. But especially I remember the longing I felt to have a best friend like Finny. Indeed, exactly like Finny. And then, voila! Midway through our first Smart Ass Painters summer, I realized it with a start: I had found my Finny in Seth. I reread the novel practically on the spot—this time much more deeply.
I understood—at that second reading of the novel—that Gene and Finny’s Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session, and the risky leap from the tree, were a kind of blood brotherhood. A way of swearing allegiance. In a pivotal scene early in the book, Finny—ever the risk taker—convinces a reluctant Gene to jump from the Suicide Tree with him. “We’ll jump together to cement our partnership,” he says. To cement our partnership! They might as well have sliced their fingers and shared blood. From the distance of thirty years, I finally understand it: These deep early friendships are so important that they need to be sworn to. Fealty must be proven by shared action, by risk taking. This is how boys—and men—show our love for one another.
At the second reading, I saw, too, how Gene held back—held back not only in the physical risk taking, but in other aspects of the friendship, as well. I identified with Gene, as I’ve said, and so I was intensely interested: What was he afraid of? He longed for merger, for a deeper communion with Finny. We can see that. We can feel it. But he feared that deeper communion, too. He doubted Finny. And he hated himself for doubting.
In one of the most tender scenes of the book, Finny—always the confident one, and much less troubled by doubt—actually declares, right out loud, his affection for Gene. The boys had run away from school for the afternoon to go to the sea shore, where they would spend the waning hours of the stormy day strolling together on the beach, and the night in sleeping bags, huddled together against the cold, and gazing in wonder at the blanket of stars overhead.
In the intimacy of their night on the darkening and slightly foreboding beach, Finny says, as they curl up in their sleeping bags next to one another,
“. . . after all you can’t come to the shore with just anybody and you can’t come by yourself, and at this teen-age period in life the proper person is your best pal.” He hesitated and then added, “which is what you are,” and there was silence on his dune.
It was a courageous thing to say [writes the now-adult Gene, who, as I’ve said, narrates the story]. Exposing a sincere emotion nakedly like that at the Devon School was the next thing to suicide. I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back.
Something held me back!
There it was: under the surface, Gene was riven by insecurity, ambivalence, doubt—even rivalry. (Gene observes in a later passage in the book, “There were few relationships among us at Devon not based on rivalry.”)
Part of Gene was longing to join deeply in friendship, and at the very same time, he was terrified of this act of joining. After all: What will be the consequences of this joining? Gene is not sure of himself in the way Finny is, and he doesn’t really know himself well enough yet to entirely trust an act of joining. As a result, Gene can all too easily—and does, in fact, as we shall see—lose himself to Finny. Indeed, the entire novel is a vivid description of Gene’s slow working through of his doubt—his final working through to a certainty of Finny’s love for him, which, alas, only comes for the heartbroken Gene after Finny’s untimely death. (Spoiler alert: One reckless act of rivalry on Gene’s part creates a devastating, Shakespearean outcome for the friends.)
2
Let’s step back from the action for a moment, and dig a little more deeply into the conflicts that Gene faces, and the conflicts that all of us certainly faced at his age, whether we were aware of them or not.
Adolescence is an intense crucible of identity formation. It marks the beginning of the formation of what we might call “a personal self.” The brain is growing in complexity (this development will continue until our late twenties), and the newly refined prefrontal cortex gives us an altogether new capacity for self-reflection. We possess, too, a new capacity for relational thinking, which the cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget called “formal-operational thinking.” This is the first mental structure that allows us to think about thinking. In psychological language, as I’ve said, we have begun to develop an “observing self,” a part of the self that can stand back and witness our own experience—can comment on it, can hold some distance from it, can even dis-identify with it. This marks the birth of an internal “Seer” that gives us a vivid new sense of depth, and gives rise to a wonderful new capacity for introspection. Indeed, all of these components mark the auspicious birth of the introspective self.
Increasingly, in adolescence, if development proceeds naturally, we have a sense of our idiosyncratic personhood. We begin to discover a sense of a unique identity. We might remember thinking with exhilaration, during this stage of our lives, “Oh, I get it. I see! This is who I am! Oh, I’m a dancer,” or, “Oh! I’m smart.” Or, “Oh! I’m an explorer.” Life seems lit up from within. We are bumping up against the world in new ways—all the while building our identity. For the first time, too, according to Dr. Piaget, we have the cognitive capacity to conceive of hypothetical futures. (I can imagine myself as an explorer, an astronaut, a great writer!) It is a time of enormous flexibility in the personality. Our boundaries are fluid.
As a result of this new strength and fluidity, we are no longer strictly bound to conventional morality, and we begin to depend increasingly on our newly personal principles of conscience and reason. It’s a period of rapid growth, of exuberance, of possibility.
At a certain point, the most urgent issue is this: Can we find the right friend? Can we find a friendship which will be the container for—and the crucible of—our growth? Because without a co-creator, none of this growth will be real.
Gene Forrester had indeed found the right friend. Why? Because he had found a friend who was interested in exploring the truth of things. The truth—beyond convention. The truth beyond stereotypical thinking. Truth is everything! The maturing mind increasingly sees things as they are, and begins to organize life accordingly.
3
So, finding a friend who is interested in and capable of truth telling is paramount. And, of course, this is precisely the kind of friend whom Gene has stumbled upon in Finny.
In a moving scene from the book—a scene in which all of this is made explicit—Finny shows his capacity to see Gene realistically, and to push Gene to see himself more clearly. Finny and Gene are coming back from their first joint, risky leap from the Suicide Tree, and are walking briskly across the fields back toward Devon School. Again, Gene is narrating the scene.
“It’s you, pal,” Finny said to me at last, “just you and me.” He and I started back across the fields, preceding the others like two seigneurs.
We were the best of friends at that moment.
“You were very good,” said Finny good-humoredly, “once I shamed you into it.”
“You didn’t shame anybody into anything.” [Retorted Gene.]
“Oh yes I did. I’m good for you that way. You have a tendency to back away from things otherwise.”
“I never backed away from anything in my life!” I cried, my indignation at this charge naturally stronger because it was so true. “You’re goofy.”
But Finny, of course, is not at all “goofy,” as Gene well knows. He is, rather, unabashed in his interest in and commitment to the truth. Finny sees things as they are. And he calls them that way.
The willingness to investigate the truth is essential to the process of breaking free of the old stories that bind us. We must, as much as possible, learn to see life as it is, not merely as it ought to be; to look fearlessly at how it is, and how it has been; to see truly where we are in the scheme of things. This is important: the work here is not just about telling stories willy-nilly, but in telling stories in such a way that they reveal the truth, both to ourselves and to others. What is true? What is real? (We must do this in order to continue to feel the realness of experience—Dr. Buie’s famous second imperative.) We must form the habit of telling ourselves the truth.
Seeing and aligning our lives with the truth is not a solitary venture—as we have begun to see. It is a co-created process, and it is co-created in relationship with a trusted other.
4
I observe now, in retrospect, that my instincts in this regard were fairly good. In my conflict with Seth, I could feel myself pushing Seth to get real. I was irritated with his posturing because it interfered with what we had to do that summer. We had to come increasingly to grips with who we were. I could smell the truth. I knew, instinctively (where did this come from—Grandma?) that we both needed this truth telling like air itself.
Telling the truth in friendship is not easy. Something altogether new is required: Real constancy. Reliability. I just wanted to be sure of you, said Piglet to his friend. I want to be sure of you because I am risking a great deal to tell you the truth.
Adolescent twinship is intensely symmetrical, contingent, and collaborative. In order to fully play its role in the developmental process, it requires constancy. And I mean intense constancy. This is why it involves intense bonding—sometimes the most intense of our lives. Safety and reliability are absolutely required. After all, the self is holding together, yes, but in these times of fluidity and growth, it is in constant threat of flying apart. It is at constant peril of not making it out of the nest of conformity and safety at all. So in order to make it out of the nest, we fledglings must huddle together. We must be best friends. Best friends forever.
5
All right. Let’s now go back now to my fight with Seth—a fight which was, obviously, about truth telling.
Two days after the fight about the Titanic story, Seth—who, as you recall, had been AWOL the entire previous day—finally came back to work. But he didn’t talk to me at all that day. He wore his floppy canvas hat pulled down low over his face, and hid behind his sunglasses, even in the shade.
The crew was solemn.
“What’s wrong with Seth?” asked Jimbo.
“He’ll be okay,” I said. “Just act normal.”
Seth and I worked side by side throughout the day, as usual. But in stilted silence.
That night, Seth showed up at our camp in the woods at about the time everyone else was leaving. I was nervous, but immensely relieved. I sensed something big coming, but I was not at all sure what it was.
We sat down by the fire and hunkered in silence for a while. He drank a beer quickly. And then another. He sighed often.
And then out of the blue, he launched into it.
He looked right at me, his face contorted with pain and rage. “I’m short. I’m a midget. I’m a freak. No one wants me.”
What the fuck? What was he talking about? Where did this come from? I was floored.
I said it out loud. “Huh? What the hell are you talking about?!”
Seth threw his half-full bottle of beer over the fire and into the woods, and hung his head between his knees. The whole thing just spilled out in a rush.
He told me about a problem with women—one that he’d never raised before with me. It was his deepest conflict, apparently, and one so dark that he’d never been able to mention it to me—even in passing, even in jest.
It turns out that Seth had experienced almost constant rejection from girls he liked. He was handsome, strong, and smart. And he knew it. But he was also very, very short. He had begun to believe that he could never find the woman of his dreams. He realized, on some level, as a result of my confrontation, that he was trying to compensate with his stories: To be big, through his stories. To be bigger than everyone else.
I was shocked. Where had he even been keeping this conflict? He had never mentioned his stature as a problem. Ever. And after that first day, his height had honestly never even occurred to me. Indeed, I didn’t think of him as small at all, but as large. I thought of him, strangely, as a big guy. A big personality. Honestly, this stature thing seemed like such a non-issue to me. But then I had to—maybe for the first time—truly envision myself in my friend’s shoes. This was difficult. And painful.
There was a tragic history behind all of this that Seth began to slowly reveal over the coming weeks. His father had made fun of him his entire life. “The midget,” he had said repeatedly, intentionally shaming Seth, usually in the heat of an argument or deep in his cups, and most often in public. “The fucking midget didn’t come from my side of the family.”
Seth had suffered most of this silently. After all, what could he do? His father was only telling the truth. Seth hadn’t confided his feelings to anyone else, ever. But he trusted me.
I felt strangely helpless that night. I didn’t know what to say. There was no denying the facts.
We got hammered that night—over the hours and hours of that conversation. Seth had come armed with two six packs of Budweiser.
I realized somehow—instinctively, in my muddled adolescent brain—that there was only one thing I could do. There was only one way I could meet Seth in his trust, in his honesty, in his suffering. Seth had stepped up. Now I had to step up, as well.
I told Seth that I was gay.
Like Seth’s story, mine spilled out in a rush. I hadn’t planned to tell him all of this. But I really laid it out there. (The beer helped a lot.) In fact, I shared with Seth the deeply secret fact that at that very moment I was having an affair with a young Amherst professor. I told him about it in some detail—and I knew that it would explain some of my mysterious absences that summer.
“That’s where I was, Seth. I had made up that I was seeing a woman. I did have a girlfriend—you know, Jill, and I loved her, really—but I was not at all attracted to her. Those nights when I was supposedly sleeping with her, I was with Jeff.”
“Jesus,” is all Seth said. He looked at me wide-eyed—and I thought maybe he backed up a little bit. He handed me another beer, clearly not knowing what else to do.
And then, pondering it all, he said as if to himself: “Well shit, man, that explains your nighttime absences.”
Seth was as shocked about my revelation as I was about his. He had not had a clue. Jeff—my professor friend—had visited our painting scenes. I’d introduced him as a good friend, a cycling buddy. I explained to Seth that actually, we had been having an affair for nine months.
Seth and I wore ourselves out with talk that night.
We fell asleep in the wee hours, and woke very, very late.
6
After this intense night together, something remarkable happened. With this sharing of secrets, our friendship took off. We had hit an altogether new level of intimacy.
Seth and I talked at length about his relationships with girls. I asked questions: Who were these girls? How had the two of them come together? And how had they inexorably (in his view) flown apart? Seth told me about the one and only young woman to whom he had confessed the truth. He told too me about the single girl with whom he had had a powerful mutual attraction, but whom he had chosen to leave because she was a foot taller than he. (“This time, I was gonna fuckin’ leave first,” he said.)
One evening shortly after all of this had exploded, Seth seemed to be particularly anxious. He was drinking heavily again.
“What the hell is going on, Seth?”
He blurted it out. “Steve,” he asked, grimacing, “I gotta ask you something. Are you in love with me? I mean, do you wanna get it on with me or anything like that?”
“Jesus,” I said. “Don’t hold back, Seth.”
Seth sidled up to me in make-believe attraction.
“Yuck,” I said. “As ugly and short as you are?”
We both laughed.
Slowly, over the weeks, as I began to feel safe in a whole new way, we talked more and more about my experience of being gay, and gay relationships. Seth was really interested.
“What do you do? I mean, what do two guys do together, exactly?”
“Well, what, exactly do two straight people do?” I countered. Fact was, I was just as curious as he was. We made a pact. All questions about sex were okay.
This began yet another new phase of our friendship. We talked about sex constantly. It cemented our friendship more deeply than sharing blood.
Once again, A Separate Peace mirrored our experience. In a similar situation, when Finny had unburdened himself of his self-doubt and insecurity, Gene had pondered the miracle: “I didn’t know why [Finny] had chosen me, why it was only to me that he could show the most humbling sides of his handicap. I didn’t care.”
I knew exactly what he meant.
7
What is the primary story we’re trying to integrate at age nineteen? Well, the story of sex, of course. Of love. Of women. Of men. Of new objects of adult attachment. What else?
Being free now to talk about this area of our lives in depth, Seth and I talked—in our most intimate times—of little else, at least for a while. (“We must talk, talk, talk!”) These conversations were irresistible—and almost every other conversation was just a prelude. There was so much to share. So much that I’d never actually shared with another human being, much less a straight guy. We found then a whole new level of comfort with one another and with ourselves. We spent late afternoons swimming in Quabbin Reservoir (strictly illegal), often naked—and enjoying the level of trust this demonstrated. This was a new kind of intimacy for me. Nothing was hidden.
Wonderfully, at this point, much of what emerged in the safety of our newly strengthened container was sheer play. There was more of us available for play now, less held back. Seth and I were like two pups. Our verbal duels became more intense and more fun. Our physical duels, as well. The episode on the lawn at Professor Maynard’s house (the racing stripe), for example, came late in the summer when we were already very comfortable with one another.
8
I was as sure of Seth as I ever had been of anyone. He had become an altogether new kind of container for me. As I have said: a container whom I also contained. This experience of reciprocity is heady. Seth and I were like gasoline and fire to each other. Not just physically, but intellectually.
Like Finny and Gene, we never went quite so far as confessing our love for one another. No matter. This was confessed every day in our actions. We were living in a whole new realm of possibility, and we both felt it.
And, like Finny and Gene, having worked through the deepest level of doubt and fear, we were free to enjoy—at moments—the merger. We were free to enjoy the prime delight of twinship—of real, unambivalent joining.
When Finny is disabled by a disastrous fall from the Suicide Tree, he, too, is able to realize the full fruit of joining. He says to Gene, “Listen, pal, if I can’t play sports, you’re going to play them for me . . .”
Gene gets it. He gets the profound meaning of this, and declares to the reader, “I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.”
The reader of A Separate Peace can only explode with a sense of the power and efficacy this joining has brought. With such a friend as Finny, our idea of who we are and who we can be expands vastly. With such a friend as Finny, the world seems charged with energy and possibility. This is twinship.
9
Adolescent twinship is the first time we have a conscious sense of the profound level of joining that takes place when we enter into deep friendship. It is the first time that we’ll have a conscious experience of our dependency upon “the other”—the profound and unnerving extent to which we depend upon particular kinds of sustaining and reassuring responses from a close other. This kind of dependency and merger have, of course, happened for us prior to adolescent twinship experiences, but without the presence of observing ego and the deepening presence of the introspective self—the parts of the self that increasingly ponder and wake up to our intense contingency.
I am now describing precisely the kinds of contingent relationships that Heinz Kohut has called “selfobject experiences.” We must look, now, at Kohut’s revolutionary thinking on this matter.
10
Selfobject. A strange term, and one that Kohut invented. Well, what is it?
Here’s what Kohut means by his term: Our friend—our selfobject—is so close to us, so involved in our developing self, so deeply entwined in us, that he is at one and the same time “self” and “other.” He is at one and the same time “self” and “object.”
Remember Winnicott’s stunning observation that “there is really no such thing as the baby. Only the mother-child dyad.” Well, even though the adolescent’s experience of merger is a considerable stretch from those early days of the mother-child dyad, nonetheless, in much the same way, we are so involved with—so interdependent upon, so merged with—our selfobjects that there is a way in which we could say that at certain crucial developmental phases there is no such thing as the self—only the self-and-object dyad.
With a friend who is a selfobject, it is very much indeed like that. (Though with more complexity.) When we’re deeply involved in an inner developmental thrust involving an important other, there is no such thing as Steve. Only “Steve-Seth.” There is no such thing as Gene. Only “Gene-Finny.” Our friend’s approbation, his presence, his reassurance, his sustaining word, is as important to us as oxygen and food. This is what I mean when I say we are intensely contingent beings.
How do you know for sure when you are in a selfobject relationship? Well, there is an infallible litmus test. You can probably guess what it is: What happens when something—internal or external—threatens the very existence of the relationship? Armageddon! This is a very big deal, indeed. When we have a so-called empathic break (a serious unresolved conflict) with a selfobject, we feel a positively desperate need to heal the conflict, to reestablish communication, and to reassure ourselves and the other of our ongoing presence and fealty.
Have you noticed? We find it hard to bear conflictual separations with selfobjects—and during these uncomfortable separations, we feel a sense that we are falling apart. We feel particularly needy, shaky, perhaps even unreal (leading at times to what psychologists call “derealization”). We become desperate for reassurance. We may, in these times—and in fact, sometimes we must—adopt temporary selfobjects as substitutes. We may find substitute love objects with whom to merge. But they will not effectively take the place of a true selfobject. This is precisely why we feel these friends to be irreplaceable. They are, in fact, quite irreplaceable indeed.
11
The newly arising consciousness of our deep interdependency gives rise to two new behaviors—behaviors that have been present in earlier selfobject relationships (with containers, obviously), but of which we are only now becoming consciously aware. These two behaviors are called “tracking” and “repair.” And they are both meant to manage potential breaks in the selfobject dyad.
Let’s look first at tracking: Because of the deep intertwining that is involved in selfobject-hood, we find ourselves acutely aware of the slightest nuances of proximity, absence, presence, or withdrawal in the other. Like a hungry animal we “track” every movement of this important other. We are sometimes, in fact, preternaturally aware of both his or her inner and outer movements. (Where is Seth tonight? Why hasn’t he checked in today? Is he okay? Is he angry with me? Why is he avoiding my gaze? Have I done something wrong?) Our inner radar is attuned to the subtlest movements of a selfobject in a way that it is attuned to absolutely no one else. Have you had this experience?
The second new behavior is called “repair.” Repair! When deeply involved in selfobject-hood, we are inevitably hyperaware of an urgent need for “repair” when there arises any kind of empathic break. Not only renewed proximity, mind you, but very explicit repair. When Gene and Finny have a falling-out, Gene finds himself positively obsessed with feelings of loneliness, abandonment, and a profound emptiness. He feels, in fact, an internal shattering. Gene misses Finny’s presence—and more even than that, he misses the inner certainty that Finny is there for him (yes, “there” at any distance whatsoever). Only when the empathic break is explicitly healed—talked through and resolved—can Gene relax. It’s as if a part of his very self is crumbling in the absence of his friend. You will almost certainly have had this experience in deep friendship.
So, we have attunement, alignment, reciprocity, resonance, joining—and now tracking and repair. These are components of all selfobject experiences, to one degree or another.
As we will see, there are many different “flavors” of selfobject-hood, and in the coming chapters we will be investigating several of the most important of these: The Adversary, The Mirror, and The Conscious Partner. Each one of these brings its own particular—sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrifying—experience of selfobject-hood, contingency, and interdependence, just as twinship and containment have.
12
At the end of our first summer of Smart Ass Painters, Seth and I took a road trip. I had to go up to my family’s summer cottage on Lake Ontario to close it up for the season. The cottage (built in 1893 by my great-great-grandfather) belonged to Armeda and Oliver, and I was eager for Seth to meet them.
It was important to me now that Seth know all about me. During that visit, I reverently showed him all of the sacred high points of my childhood summers at the lake: where my friends and I dove off the big pier into the foreboding waters of Lake Ontario (our own Super Suicide Society), where we water-skied, where we slept out on a big sandbar that reached out into the immense lake and talked deep into the night. I took Seth to the cemetery to show him my ancestors laid out under the big stone monuments, and I told him the stories—the stories that had been told to me, by Grandma and others.
And finally, the pièce de résistance: Seth and I drove from the cottage to my grandparents’ house nearby, and sat on the big front porch with Armeda—talking and rocking and watching life go by. My two containers, my two Soul Friends, had come together. I could barely contain my joy. Life was intertwining in wonderful ways.
Seth and Grandma and I sat on the front porch at 2800 East Main Street, and enjoyed the warm breeze of a late summer evening: Grandma in her rocker, dressed in a simple summer housedress, relaxed and smiling. Seth with his long ponytail, floppy hat, and sandals. I think they fell in love with one another that afternoon. (Or maybe it was simply the reflected love they both had for me that allowed them to connect so intensely.) Nonetheless, at the time, I believed that Seth was captivated by Grandma’s obvious beauty and charm. There is no doubt that on some level they got one another. And I got to see each of them more deeply, reflected in the mirror of the other.
Later that night, back at the cottage, Seth and I sat on the front porch looking out at the vast gray blue of Lake Ontario as twilight turned to darkness. I felt the depth and vastness of the lake as if it were inside me. I was feeling bigger, larger. There was strangely more of me. (“We are bigger and deeper than we thought,” wrote Walt Whitman.)
Writer and philosopher Ken Wilber has astutely observed that we experience every phase of our development as adults as somehow “deeper in” than the preceding stage. Deeper in! Our newly emerging self—our newly introspective self—feels somehow “interior to” our old self. We have a growing sense of a small, still voice speaking to us from deep within. And as this deeper self emerges, it is wrapped around in a sense of mystery, of awe, of spirituality. Seth and I would not in a million years have used that word. But there it was.
The summer had changed us. We had begun it as children. We had ended it as fledgling adults.
13
Strangely, after the summer’s experience with Seth, I finally felt that I fit in at Amherst College. For the first time, back at school that fall, I felt a deep sense of belonging to that elite New England institution. For the rest of my years there, in fact, I savored school. But I can see now that all this was clearly the result of not just of belonging to a place and a group of people, but strangely, of belonging to myself. For the first time, I was feeling a full fit with myself. I came out of the closet that next year to most of my friends, and I challenged some other boys to do so. Almost no one did, of course. For most of them, it wasn’t yet time.
I had one more summer with Seth and the crew. One more summer of deep play. And then it was over, though Seth and I have remained lifelong friends. But those two summers are seared in memory and occur to me now almost as a kind of novel in which I was one of the starring characters. Those two summers still represent to me life at its most vivid.
I would have other twinships throughout my life. Indeed, I have one now with my best friend Brian. It is a rare and lovely thing. And it reminds me that in moments of growth, we find out who we are in part by who we are attracted to. By who we are fascinated with. In these times of self-discovery, we seek out other twins, we recreate our narrative, we reinvent ourselves.
“You’re my best pal,” says Finny to Gene. He means it. When, not too long ago, Brian and I acknowledged to one another that we were best friends, it practically broke my heart with joy. Best friends. Sweeter words have seldom been spoken or heard.
things to ponder: twinship