Disclaimer: Dead Poets Society doesn't belong to me, I swear.
Note: The final quotation is from Act II, Scene VI, Line 10 of Romeo and Juliet, and is spoken by Friar Lawrence. In keeping with Dead Poets Society, I should probably have used A Midsummer Night's Dream, but I felt that Romeo and Juliet fit the themes of my story better.
Every student knew that Mr. Anderson refused to teach Romeo and Juliet, in spite of all attempts to convince him of its relevance to the English curriculum. The school administration regarded this quirk with indulgent eyes; Mr. Anderson was an excellent and popular teacher, and provided that he made a show of weighing the play's literary merits whenever the subject was broached, he was permitted to reject it with a succinct and unvarying, "It's too true."
No one understood what this might mean. After all, wasn't any work of literature that had managed to resonate across the ages "true?"
The conversation never progressed beyond this point. No one ever discovered what precisely Mr. Anderson's objections were, nor did it ever occur to anyone that his reservations might be founded in personal, rather than scholarly, distaste.
And no one ever knew that Mr. Anderson often flipped wistfully through the pages of Romeo and Juliet in his study at night, reflecting on its portrayal of the beautiful transience of youthful passion and fire that could slip from ecstasy to despair in moments. No one ever guessed the agonizing thoughts that gripped him during those long hours – how wonderful, terrible, and unstable such young emotion was, and how poetically fitting that it destroyed those that it consumed. And no one ever saw his watery notes next to the line that read, "These violent delights have violent ends."
