Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

April 3—Finished Robinson Crusoe. I want to find out more about what happens to him but Miss Kinnian says thats all there is. WHY.

But, she says, everybody, uses commas, so Ill, use them, too,,,,

My anger was an exciting feeling, and I didn’t give it up easily. I was ready to fight.

“I’m not close to him.” He looked at me defiantly. “But he’s put his whole life into this. He’s no Freud or Jung or Pavlov or Watson, but he’s doing something important and I respect his dedication—maybe even more because he’s just an ordinary man trying to do a great man’s work, while the great men are all busy making bombs.”

The walls between people are thin here, and if I listen quietly, I hear what is going on. Greenwich Village is like that too. Not just being close—because I don’t feel it in a crowded elevator or on the subway during the rush—but on a hot night when everyone is out walking, or sitting in the theater, there is a rustling, and for a moment I brush against someone and sense the connection between the branch and trunk and the deep root. At such moments my flesh is thin and tight, and the unbearable hunger to be part of it drives me out to search in the dark corners and blind alleys of the night.

But this was the counterweight, the act of binding and holding. As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other’s hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing.

Why am I always looking at life through a window?

Its getting chilly out but I still put flowers on Algernons grave. Mrs Mooney thinks Im silly to put flowers on a mouses grave but I told her that Algernon was a special mouse.

If you ever reed this Miss Kinnian dont be sorry for me. Im glad I got a second chanse in life like you said to be smart because I lerned alot of things that I never even new were in this werld and Im grateful I saw it all even for a littel bit. And Im glad I found out all about my family and me. It was like I never had a family til I remembird about them and saw them and now I know I had a family and I was a person just like evryone.

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