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The rotten thing is that all of the pleasure is gone because the others resent me. In a way, I can’t blame them. They don’t understand what has happened to me, and I can’t tell them. People are not proud of me the way I expected—not at all.
“But I’m not an inanimate object,” I argued. “I’m a person.” He looked confused for a moment and then laughed. “Of course, Charlie. But I wasn’t referring to now. I meant before the operation.”
He treated me—even then—as a human being.
It may sound like ingratitude, but that is one of the things that I resent here—the attitude that I am a guinea pig. Nemur’s constant references to having made me what I am, or that someday there will be others like me who will become real human beings. How can I make him understand that he did not create me?
Exceptional refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I’ve been exceptional.
Like Algernon, I found myself behind the mesh of the cage they had built around 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.
Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men. A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.
I told myself I was wandering around like a lost soul, and then I saw that I was lost.
It’s not love—but she’s important to me.
I’ve been starved for simple human contact.
Souls withered from the beginning, and doomed to stare into the time and space of every day.
“The problem, dear professor, is that you wanted someone who could be made intelligent but still be kept in a cage and displayed when necessary to reap the honors you seek. The hitch is that I’m a person.”
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.
ARTIFICIALLY-INDUCED INTELLIGENCE DETERIORATES AT A RATE OF TIME DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL TO THE QUANTITY OF THE INCREASE.
I put Algernon’s body into a small metal container and took him home with me. I wasn’t going to let them dump him into the incinerator. It’s foolish and sentimental, but late last night I buried him in the back yard. I wept as I put a bunch of wild flowers on the grave.
The role I had always wanted to play—the big brother.
What was the use of telling her she had undoubtedly been awake that night as a child, and had seen the whole thing from her room—that it had been repressed and twisted until she imagined it as a fantasy. No reason for burdening her with the truth.
There was no way to stop the sands of knowledge from slipping through the hourglass of my mind.
I tell myself there’ll be time enough to sleep later, when it’s dark.
And then, as I know I am about to pierce the crust of existence, like a flying fish leaping out of the sea, I feel the pull from below.
But then it hit me like a fist against the side of my head that I didn’t remember what I had to do. It was as if I had been looking at the whole thing clearly on the blackboard of my mind, but when I turned to read it, part of it had been erased and the rest didn’t make sense.
But until you go, there’s no reason for either of us to be alone.”
It was the first step outward to the universe—beyond the universe—because in it and with it we merged to recreate and perpetuate the human spirit.
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. 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
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when I close my eyes I think about the man who tored the book and he looks like me only he looks different and he talks different but I dont think its me because its like I see him from the window.
P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.
