What We Stay Alive For

Chapter Ten: Brood of Grown and Part-Grown Boys

10, September 1959.

"My brood of grown and part-grown tough boys accompanying me,

Who love to be with no one else so well as they love to be with me,

By day to work with me, and by night to sleep with me.

Onward we move, a gay gang of blackguards!"

-'Friendship and Loving Touch,' Walt Whitman

The week that follows the first meeting of the born-again Dead Poets Society is one that only boys of possibly sixteen or seventeen can understand.

The group leaves that cave and, when you leave a place, it is expected that you leave older than you once were. Time has passed. You are supposedly older and wiser than the you that entered. But, these seven friends of sixteen or seventeen leave the cave, officially closing the first meeting of their Dead Poets Society, and they must be impossibly younger than what they say. They skip. They laugh. They roll in the grass fields.

There must be something about male friendships that causes you to be younger than the official number. In male friendships, you experience life in a constant adolescence where girls are not permitted. Boys stare aging in her alluring eyes and do not fear it; to develop is nothing when there are friends by your side experiencing it too.

And they all experience it, those seven, that entire week and onward.

They experience it when Neil runs out of that cave and clicks his heels. He dances through the dim-lit halls of Welton, kicking his feet and throwing up his hands. Everyone shushes him, Todd staring at him with his big brown eyes, and even that doesn't force Neil to let up. He's laughing and, eventually, his friends are laughing with him.

They experience it when Cameron falls asleep during their study hall session that Monday night. Charlie pokes Cameron's cheek with the eraser-end of a pencil. Cameron awakens and Charlie (with the most mischievous grin) tells him that he is going to be late for class. Cameron bolts out the room with a cry, only to return with an annoyed scowl. He had only been asleep for about five minutes. The small hand on the clock had hardly crossed over the 10.

Todd thinks it's probably the funniest thing to happen in years.

They experience it on the tenth of September when they slide into their desk in John Keating's classroom.

"Good afternoon, boys." Keating introduces them to the second half of their day, kicking a crumpled piece of paper on the floor towards the trash can by his desk. "Today, we will be discussing poetry!" He pauses like he's waiting for the thunderous applause, but no one gives it to him. The only sound heard is a snort from a boy in the back of the class.

Keating sighs dramatically. "Yes, Yes. I can tell you are surprised by the look on your depressing mugs. Another day of," he lowers his tone of voice and dons a particularly good British accent, "Poetry, which utters universal truth! Poetry, which demands a man with a touch of madness to him!" Another pause and another silence. "Ah, no one here has read from Aristotle's 'Poetics,' hm? Mr. Pitts?"

Gerard shakes his head. "No! I haven't read it. Yet."

"Yet!" Keating parrots. "I wouldn't be bothered, Mr. Pitts, I would throw the book away altogether given the chance. Listen-" He speedwalks to the front of the room and stops when he's behind his desk. The tips of his fingers rest against the cover of a book on the tabletop. "Let's take a page from my own book."

"You have a book!" Cameron exclaims without raising his hand. He vocalizes some odd combination of screaming and gasping, throwing that unused hand over his mouth.