Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

And she said mabey they got no rite to make me smart because if god wantid me to be smart he would have made me born that way.

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.

“Charlie, you’re wonderful.” I caught her hand and held it. “No, it’s you. You touch my eyes and make me see.”

“Which don’t mean to say,” she remarked, “that I don’t think there’s something mighty strange about you, Charlie. The way you’ve changed! I don’t know. You used to be a good, dependable man—ordinary, not too bright maybe, but honest—and who knows what you done to yourself to get so smart all of a sudden. Like everybody’s been saying—it ain’t right.” “But what’s wrong with a person wanting to be more intelligent, to acquire knowledge, and understand himself and the world?” “If you’d read your Bible, Charlie, you’d know that it’s not meant for man to know more than was given to him to know by the Lord in the first place. The fruit of that tree was forbidden to man. Charlie, if you done anything you wasn’t supposed to—you know, like with the devil or something—maybe it ain’t too late to get out of it. Maybe you could go back to being the good simple man you was before.”

Before, they had laughed at me, despising me for my ignorance and dullness; now, they hated me for my knowledge and understanding. Why? What in God’s name did they want of me?

So this is how a person can come to despise himself—knowing he’s doing the wrong thing and not being able to stop.

As I listened to what she was saying, the enormity of it dawned on me. I had been so absorbed in myself and what was happening to me that I never thought about what was happening to her.

He treated me—even then—as a human being.

“I call it competitive inhibition of enzymes. Let me give you an example of how it works. Think of the enzyme produced by the defective gene as a wrong key which fits into the chemical lock of the central nervous system—but won’t turn. Because it’s there, the true key—the right enzyme—can’t even enter the lock. It’s blocked. Result? Irreversible destruction of proteins in the brain tissue.”

lock and key!! thank you mr phillips🙏

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.

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. That’s what I discovered about myself last night. I told myself I was wandering around like a lost soul, and then I saw that I was lost.

If I can find that out, and if it adds even one jot of information to whatever else has been discovered about mental retardation and the possibility of helping others like myself, I will be satisfied. Whatever happens to me, I will have lived a thousand normal lives by what I might add to others not yet born. That’s enough.

“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.”

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

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