Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

If your smart you can have lots of frends to talk to and you never get lonley by yourself all the time.

‘The more intelligent you become the more problems you’ll have, Charlie.

I never knew about these things before. It’s like if I get intelligent enough I’ll understand all the words in my mind,

Now I understand one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you’ve believed in all your life aren’t true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.

How does a person go about learning how to act toward another person? How does a man learn how to behave toward a woman?

Next to you I am rather dull-witted. Nowadays every time we see each other, after I leave you I go home with the miserable feeling that I’m slow and dense about everything. I review things I’ve said, and come up with all the bright and witty things I should have said, and I feel like kicking myself because I didn’t mention them when we were together.’

I had been so absorbed in myself and what was happening to me that I never thought about what was happening to her.

It was important to her, and I sat quietly as one sits before a bird that feeds from your palm.

I would come to her for comforting, and her anger would break over me.

I see now that when Norma flowered in our garden I became a weed, allowed to exist only where I would not be seen, in corners and dark places.

Nothing in our minds is ever really gone.

How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes – how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence.

A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.

The foolish thing was trying to solve the problem all by myself. But the deeper I get tangled up in this mass of dreams and memories the more I realize that emotional problems can’t be solved as intellectual problems are.

No one had spoken of hope. The feeling was of living death – or worse, of never having been fully alive and knowing. Souls withered from the beginning, and doomed to stare into the time and space of every day.

‘No one really starts anything new, Mrs Nemur. Everyone builds on other men’s failures. There is nothing really original in science. What each man contributes to the sum of knowledge is what counts.’

intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.’

Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.

Who’s to say that my light is better than your darkness? Who’s to say death is better than your darkness? Who am I to say? . . .

This was the way we loved, until the night became a silent day. And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other’s arms, giving and taking. The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other – child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway toward the goal-box of solitary death.

Alice knows everything about me now, and accepts the fact that we can be together for only a short while. She has agreed to go away when I tell her to go. It’s painful to think about that, but what we have, I suspect, is more than most people find in a lifetime.