Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

She said never mind but I shouldnt feel bad if I find out that everybody isnt nice like I think. She said for a person who God gave so little to you did more than a lot of people with brains they never even used.

“The more intelligent you become the more problems you’ll have, Charlie. Your intellectual growth is going to outstrip your emotional growth.

I had reached a new level, and anger and suspicion were my first reactions to the world around me.

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.

I began to see that by my astonishing growth I had made them shrink and emphasized their inadequacies. I had betrayed them, and they hated me for it.

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.

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

I realize that emotional problems can’t be solved as intellectual problems are.

“Everything but treat me as a human being. You’ve boasted time and again that I was nothing before the experiment, and I know why. Because if I was nothing, then you were responsible for creating me, and that makes you my lord and master. You resent the fact that I don’t show my gratitude every hour of the day. Well, believe it or not, I am grateful. But what you did for me—wonderful as it is—doesn’t give you the right to treat me like an experimental animal. I’m an individual now, and so was Charlie before he ever walked into that lab. You look shocked! Yes, suddenly we discover that I was always a person—even before—and that challenges your belief that someone with an I.Q. of less than 100 doesn’t deserve consideration. Professor Nemur, I think when you look at me your conscience bothers you.” “I’ve

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 had dreamed of a time like this, but now that it was here, what good was it?

There was no way to stop the sands of knowledge from slipping through the hourglass of my mind.

I passed your floor on the way up, and now I’m passing it on the way down, and I don’t think I’ll be taking this elevator again. So let’s just say good-bye here and now.”

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