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. Your intellectual growth is going to outstrip your emotional growth.

How different they seem to be now. And how foolish I was ever to have thought that professors were intellectual giants. They’re people—and afraid the rest of the world will find out.

Now I can see where I got the unusual motivation for becoming smart that so amazed everyone at first. It was something Rose Gordon lived with day and night. Her fear, her guilt, her shame that Charlie was a moron. Her dream that something could be done. The urgent question always: whose fault was it, hers or Matt’s? Only after Norma proved to her that she was capable of having normal children, and that I was a freak, did she stop trying to make me over. But I guess I never stopped wanting to be the smart boy she wanted me to be, so that she would love me.

But still it’s frightening to realize that my fate is in the hands of men who are not the giants I once thought them to be, men who don’t know all the answers.

I can’t say I remember Rose’s face. Although the recent photograph is a clear one, I still see it through the gauze of childhood. I knew her, and I didn’t know her.

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.

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. It infuriated me to remember that not too long ago I—like this boy—had foolishly played the clown. And I had almost forgotten. Only a short time ago, I learned that people laughed at me. Now I can see that unknowingly I joined them in laughing at myself. That hurts most of all.

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

“I can’t help feeling that I’m not me. I’ve usurped his place and locked him out the way they locked me out of the bakery. What I mean to say is that Charlie Gordon exists in the past, and the past is real. You can’t put up a new building on a site until you destroy the old one, and the old Charlie can’t be destroyed. He exists. At first I was searching for him: I went to see his—my—father. All I wanted to do was prove that Charlie existed as a person in the past, so that I could justify my own existence. I was insulted when Nemur said he created me. But I’ve discovered that not only did Charlie exist in the past, he exists now. In me and around me. He’s been coming between us all along. I thought my intelligence created the barrier—my pompous, foolish pride, the feeling we had nothing in common because I had gone beyond you. You put that idea into my head. But that’s not it. It’s Charlie, the little boy who’s afraid of women because of things his mother did to him. Don’t you see? All these months while I’ve been growing up intellectually, I’ve still had the emotional wiring of the childlike Charlie. And every time I came close to you, or thought about making love to you, there was a short circuit.”

But then, I can’t blame him because he doesn’t realize that finding out who I really am—the meaning of my total existence involves knowing the possibilities of my future as well as my past, where I’m going as well as where I’ve been. Although we know the end of the maze holds death (and it is something I have not always known—not long ago the adolescent in me thought death could happen only to other people), I see now that the path I choose through that maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being—one of many ways—and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.

I wondered about the house-mother with her red-blotched face, and the stuttering shop teacher, and the motherly principal, and youthful tired-looking psychologist, and wished I knew how they had found their way here to work and dedicate themselves to these silent minds. Like the boy who held the younger one in his arms, each had found a fulfillment in giving away a part of himself to those who had less.

“But I’ve learned that intelligence alone doesn’t mean a damned thing. Here in your university, intelligence, education, knowledge, have all become great idols. But I know now there’s one thing you’ve all overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” I said. “Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I’ve discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: 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.

I was seeing myself as I really had become: Nemur had said it. I was an arrogant, self-centered bastard. Unlike Charlie, I was incapable of making friends or thinking about other people and their problems. I was interested in myself, and myself only. For one long moment in that mirror I had seen myself through Charlie’s eyes—looked down at myself and saw what I had really become. And I was ashamed.

I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.

Why am I always looking at life through a window?

P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.