Wit & Attitude Quote by John Knowles

Memory softens edges and arranges motives, and the speaker remembers a cohort that met the war years with a studious sobriety. Set against the backdrop of World War II at a New England prep school much like the Devon School in John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, the line contrasts two cultural scripts for adolescence: the mythic, swaggering rush to enlist or carouse, and the quieter discipline of finishing assignments. The boast is oddly modest, a claim to maturity measured not in battlefield zeal but in homework done a day ahead, as if diligence could anchor a world tilting toward catastrophe.

That attention to desks and deadlines hints at both privilege and anxiety. Students at an elite school could postpone enlistment; their duty, for the moment, was academic. Yet the very phrase tomorrow’s homework suggests a nervous relationship to the future, an attempt to control what can be controlled when global events render most plans provisional. Responsibility becomes performance as much as character, a ritual that wards off fear. The comparison with earlier wars also carries skepticism about romanticized martial rites of passage. By the 1940s, the glamour of war had been stripped by mechanized slaughter and total mobilization; sober compliance seemed more fitting than bravado.

Knowles’s narrative, voiced by Gene Forrester, complicates the self-congratulation. Even as the boys keep to schedules, they wrestle with jealousy, guilt, and the need to define themselves against the looming draft. Finny’s exuberance and Gene’s reserve form a private theater of conflict that the tidy image of responsible scholars cannot contain. The claim of maturity thus reads as both true and evasive: they were made older by the war’s shadow, but their desks also served as fortifications behind which they could delay the ultimate test. Doing tomorrow’s homework becomes a symbol of adolescence suspended, a fragile order maintained while waiting for history to call.