The Undiscovered Country

This week’s Sunday literary-ism is a little late. Also, it’s not in the public domain, so I don’t have any of those elegantly-formatted quotations everyone has been clamoring for.

John Knowles’ novel _A Separate Peace_ takes place at a boarding school on the eve of World War II. Two metaphors rivers run through the campus, one freshwater and the other brackish. The latter feeds into the ocean; the narrator describes it as being influenced by “unimaginably distant forces” like tides and ocean currents. They stand for the contrast between the protected life at a sequestered prep school and the uncertainty of young adulthood in a time of war. A lot of the book is about the strange feeling of being suspended between two worlds—one familiar (the present) and one alien (the near future).

The J&G fiasco as well as the Mayer, Brown layoffs have led me to realize that as a graduating law student I really am setting off into a world controlled by forces I don’t understand very well. Partners can get laid off? I didn’t know that. Law firms can stop existing just because a few people in one office were cheating? Oh.