ASP Quote Significance Ch.8,9-12/1

Ch. 8:

"'The winter loves me,' he retorted, and then, disliking the whimsical sound of that, added, 'I mean as much as you can say a season can love. What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.' I didn't think this was true, my seventeen years of experience had shown this to be much more false than true, but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny's: it should have been true. So I didn't argue." (111)

Here, we have another of Finny's Commandments: "When you love something, it loves you back, in any way it can." I think this, at least to Finny, really stands for the saying that nothing is done for a bad reason. Everything has some good quality to it. It's also, I think, a way of justifying Gene's actions. Finny knows that Gene pushed himf rom the tree, but the previous visions of Finny as confused or troubled were probably of him trying to figure out exactly what happened and why. Now that he knows Gene did it for sure, he justifies it by saying this, another commandment. He's using it to justify Gene's pushing him out of the tree as, somehow, and act of friendship, or loving him back. How, I do not know, but it somehow is in Finny's eyes. It's Finny's way of making the world seem a beter place than it really is.

Could Finny be doing all this(making up games, acting spontaneous, etc.) as a way of justifying the world around him, of making it better in his eyes?

Ch. 9:

"It wasn't the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace." (136-137)

The quote itself is pretty explanatory. This explains the title and what exactly the boys were doing during their time at Devon. The outside world no longer existed, or even mattered, to them. What they were doing was their own world. They made their own games. They remade current events in honor of their friend [Leper] who enlisted. They trained for Olympics a year away that were not even confirmed yet. They made their own, seperate peace. Their world didn't have a war. This relates to the title of the book and, in my opinion, is a quintessential quote of the book.

What future events could Leper's enlistment and apparent escape(as seen in the telegram) incur on Gene and friends?