Moron.
There are all kinds of things it brings to mind that I so intensely want to share, discuss, or at least get out in the open, somehow. I do a good job of putting all those ideas together in my mind, but memories are so fleeting. I often forget what it was I intended to write in the first place by the time I actually get to a computer. I don't write by hand anymore unless it's lists, something menial. I write far too slowly.
For those of you who haven't read the book, Flowers for Algernon is a novel about a man named Charlie, 32 years old. He is retarded, apparently with an "eye-q of 68", or so the book tells us. The thing that makes Charlie different from other adult 'retardates' is that he is very determined to 'become smart'. As such, he becomes the first human to undergo an experimental surgery that allows him to become intelligent - a genius, in fact. He soon outpaces his friends, then his teacher and the professors and doctors who allowed him to become this way.
Watching him progressively gain intelligence and apply it given his still child-like emotional state was exciting for me. Rarely do I read fiction, and even less frequently do I find myself rooting for the main character, or even caring about him at all. Charlie was different.
I have always been rather open about my dislike for - and fear of - people with unusually low intelligence. I oftentimes have trouble restraining my contempt for people who are of perfectly average intelligence, so you can perhaps deduce the extent of my dislike. I'm sure this all reads as very egotistical, but please bear with me. I do try to be honest as much as possible, but in my Livejournal I make it a policy to be honest all of the time.
Charlie starts off as somebody who I can imagine being irritating, perhaps not actively but simply by the merit of his existence. He describes himself from footage taken as 'open-mouthed', which right off the bat is a pet-peeve of mine*. However, early on in the book I was taken by the fact that in his simplicity, he noticed things that people such as myself often pass over - the pattern in which a man lowers and raises his eyebrows in relation to how and when his mouth twitches, for instance. It reminded me of the sort of things a friend of mine, Ski, often notices. He believes so earnestly and purely in old aphorisms like "It is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all" that I begin to wonder if perhaps he is the smart one, able to clearly see the bigger picture while I am the slow one, caught endlessly in a pointless tangle of details and second guesses. I also wondered this about Charlie and his purity of belief - in the value of friendship, the importance of the company of others.
Even so, it was his progress that was the biggest thrill. He spoke of the unquenchable thirst for knowledge that I have had come and go so unpredictably in my life. His joy in learning was so identifiable that I felt, somehow, less lost and alone.
The story is told through a series of 'progress reports', and watching his spelling and punctuation improve after the surgery was a joy. I noticed when he began to use metaphors in his writing. I thought to myself, "The author went to a lot of trouble to do this." I find myself wondering what was going through the author's mind in 1959, when he wrote the story.
Inevitably, Charlie finds himself looking down on others when he reaches the apex of his intelligence. He realizes that he has become selfish and antisocial, too introspective. I am nowhere near as intelligent as we are made to believe Charlie is in the book, but I know that folly well.
I am selfish.
I am asocial, though perhaps not antisocial.
I am too introspective.
I understand the feeling that perhaps learning and knowing is more important than friendship and other sundry types of relationships we have with others, and alternately I understand the driving need to feel associated with someone, and yet not quite have what it takes to make that happen, whether it be because you are too absorbed in yourself or simply afraid of failing.
In the fifth grade, I can recall asking my teacher (I think her name was Mrs. Owens) whether she thought I was ready to go on to the sixth grade or not. Middle school was a big deal, I recall. I don't remember exactly what it was that prompted me to ask her, but I do recall that she said "No." I know that I had an inkling of what she meant at the time - I knew it had something to do with how poorly I got on with my classmates, because it certainly couldn't be about getting straight As up until that point in my school career. I'm sure at the time I was sort of hurt, and it only served to confirm in my mind that I was misunderstood and under-appreciated. This, of course, was true to some extent. I was misunderstood. What others saw as me simply being strange and unwashed and pushy about the things I found interesting - while being completely uninterested in whatever it was they liked - was in truth simple ignorance of some of the most basic, unspoken rules of social interaction. I did not know, and I did not know that I did not know. But Mrs. Owens knew very well that I did not know. I'll never know whether I should have been held back or not on account of being emotionally and socially retarded, but at least now I can look back and recognize what was going on.
In more ways than one, Charlie Gordon's plight in Flowers for Algernon made me think of my own life and how so often feel as if I am miserably drowning in it, an unwitting passenger on a trip I never asked to take. I know exactly how it feels to have the capacity for knowledge that should, by all rights, allow you to do great things and yet constantly feel haunted by the spectre of once you did once, of who you once were and are no more. I know how it feels to have your social and emotional immaturity hold you back. I know how it feels because it is happening right now.
I did not stop feeling as if I understood Charlie when he began to lose his intelligence just as fast as he gained it. This is the only thing which sustained me against my deeply ingrained bad habit of switching off the TV or closing the book when it hits too close to home**, or when a story is predictable and that predictable thing happens to be something horrible and painful and guilt-inducing. I said to myself, No, this is something you have to do. You have to read this book from start to finish, no matter how painful the inevitable may be. It wasn't as if I'd predicted incorrectly. He did revert back to where he began, all of his "enoughs" as "enuffs". And the trip from genius to subnormal intelligence was as painful as I'd thought it would be.
I know it's hyperbolic but I feel that way. I've felt that way for a long time. I've often wondered why it is that I don't just remember everything I read in books anymore, because it used to be automatic - not even a question of 'easy' or 'hard'. I wonder why it is I was able to take and understand an algebra class in the fourth grade, but when I took the class two years later, I failed it. I wonder why it is that I was able to hold it together well enough to make good grades in elementary school even though things at home certainly weren't better then than they were later in my life. Why did I fail later? I often feel as if I've lost my capacity for learning, or perhaps even intelligence itself. When I was young I never imagined that intelligence was a thing you could lose, barring some kind of terrible accident that left you with permanent brain damage. That first F in a course left me broken and disbelieving that it had truly come to that. At that point - what was it, the seventh grade? I already suspected I was doomed to failure, and there it was, finally staring me in the face. Then I knew I was a failure, and nobody could argue that fact. The idea that I am a failure has stuck with me to varying degrees ever since.
Fatalism is a trying master to overthrow.
I often feel as if without that extra spark, there is little to drive me forward. I tell myself that I will be a doctor just as I used to tell myself I would be an animator or an illustrator, but every attempt in any direction inevitably leads to the natural little hitches that arise in any plan, except to me these feel like crushing failures. I think that if I became a doctor, I would no longer be so afraid of failure because by that point I would have obviously proved that I was able to overcome the insignificant events of my childhood. But is that right? It is hard to imagine not living in crippling terror of failure. I occasionally experience little bursts of bravado that allow me to pretend for just a little while that I have confidence at all in my own abilities, and that I will succeed someday. When I have these I feel encouraged that maybe I am finally rising out of the depression that has clung like humidity for the last... what is it? Eight or so years of my life.
At the end of the book, not only is Charlie no longer able to read his own paper on the theory and surgical procedure that he underwent, he is no longer able to read and understand Robinson Crusoe. He wets himself when cornered. He forgot the intense romance he had with his former teacher during his brief, shining moment of genius and returns to her class as if nothing had ever happened.
He is startled when she runs from the room, crying. He has even forgotten the angst of knowing that with each passing day, he was growing less intelligent. He is gone. Charlie is Charlie again.
I have to take my medication so I can sleep without waking up every two hours.
*I am consciously well aware that there is no rational reason to dislike mouth-breathers and other people who are slack-jawed all the time, but something in me that lacks a conscious voice is very insistent - it's just something I can't stand. Now, of course, working in a hospital I do see this from time to time in the elderly. I don't really hold it against the senile, no matter the reason that senility was brought about.
**Oddly enough, while I have a lot of trouble having most emotions - much less identifying them as painful in my own life - when it comes to fiction, I'm easily guilted or angered or left with this lingering, urgent awareness of my own emptiness. It is always such a sharp and startling difference from how I usually feel that it typically overwhelms me and I have to remove myself from the situation, which is easy when all it takes is closing a book. I do not know if this disconnect stems from the knowledge that dealing with all of my own real-life problems would be unbearably painful if I were to acknowledge the emotions it could cause, or if it's because I am a diehard roleplayer. I suspect they are both related, even if only in that I am a diehard roleplayer because of that little issue.