Flowers for Algernon

Geology: nothing about geomorphology or stratigraphy or even petrology. Nothing about the micro- or macro-economic theory. Little in mathematics beyond the ele­mentary level of calculus of variations, and nothing at all about Banach algebra or Riemannian manifolds. It was the first inkling of the revelations that were in store for me this weekend.

I couldn't stay at the party. I slipped away to walk and think this out. Frauds—both of them. They had pretended to be geniuses. But they were just ordinary men working blindly, pretending to be able to bring light into the dark­ness. Why is it that everyone lies? No one I know is what he appears to be. As I turned the corner I caught a glimpse of Burt coming after me.

'What's the matter?' I said as he caught up to me. 'Are you following me?'

He shrugged and laughed uncomfortably. 'Exhibit A,

star of the show. Can't have you run down by one of these motorized Chicago cowboys or mugged and rolled on State Street?'

'I don't like being kept in custody.'

He avoided my gaze as he walked beside me, his hands deep in his pockets. 'Take it easy, Charlie. The old man is on edge. This convention means a lot to him. His reputa­tion is at stake.'

'I didn't know you were so close to him,' I taunted, recalling all the times Burt had complained about the pro­fessor's narrowness and pushing.

'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.'

'I'd like to hear you call him ordinary to his face.'

'It doesn't matter what he thinks of himself. Sure he's egotistic, so what? It takes that kind of ego to make a man attempt a thing like this. I've seen enough of men like him to know that mixed in with that pompousness and self-assertion is a goddamned good measure of uncer­tainty and fear.'

'And phoniness and shallowness,' I added. 'I see them now as they really are, phonies. I suspected it of Nemur. He always seemed frightened of something. But Strauss sur­prised me.'

Burt paused and let out a long stream of breath. We turned into a luncheonette for coffee, and I didn't see his face, but the sound revealed his exasperation.

'You think I'm wrong?'

'Just that you've come a long way kind of fast,' he said. 'You've got a superb mind now, intelligence that can't really be calculated, more knowledge absorbed by now than most people pick up in a long lifetime. But you're lopsided. You know things. You see things. But you haven't developed understanding, or—I have to use the word— tolerance. You call them phonies, but when did either of them ever claim to be perfect, or superhuman? They're or­dinary people. You're the genius.'

He broke off awkwardly, suddenly aware that he was preaching at me.

'Go ahead.'

'Ever meet Nemur's wife?'

'No.'

'If you want to understand why he's under tension all the time, even when things are going well at the lab and in his lectures, you've got to know Bertha Nemur. Did you know she's got him his professorship? Did you know she used her father's influence to get him the Welberg Founda­tion grant? Well, now she's pushed him into this premature presentation at the convention. Until you've had a woman like her riding you, don't think you can understand the man who has.'

I didn't say anything, and I could see he wanted to get back to the hotel. All the way back we were silent.

Am I a genius? I don't think so. Not yet anyway. As Burt would put it, mocking the euphemisms of educational jargon, I'm exceptional —a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of gifted and deprived (which used to mean bright and retarded) and as soon as exceptional begins to mean anything to anyone they'll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn't mean anything to anybody. Exceptional refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I've been exceptional.

Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I fool­ishly thought I could learn everything—all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its ex­istence, and to understand one grain of it.

Is there time?

Burt is annoyed with me. He finds me impatient and the others must feel the same. But they hold me back and try to keep me in my place. What is my place? Who and what am I now? Am I the sum of my life or only of the past months? Oh, how impatient they get when I try to discuss it with them. They don't like to admit that they don't know. It's paradoxical that an ordinary man like Nemur presumes to devote himself to making other people geniuses. He would like to be thought of as the discoverer of new laws of learning—the Einstein of psychology. And he has the teacher's fear of being surpassed by the student, the master's dread of having the disciple discredit his work. (Not that I am in any real sense Nemur's student or disciple as Burt is.)

I guess Nemur's fear of being revealed as a man walking on stilts among giants is understandable. Failure at this point would destroy him. He is too old to start all over again.

As shocking as it is to discover the truth about men I had respected and looked up to, I guess Burt is right. I must not be too impatient with them. Their ideas and bril­liant work made the experiment possible. I've got to guard against the natural tendency to look down on them now that I have surpassed them.

I've got to realize that when they continually admon­ish me to speak and write simply so that people who read these reports will be able to understand me, they are talk­ing about themselves as well. But still it's frightening to re­alize that my fate is in the hands of men who are not the giants I once thought them to be, men who don't know all the answers.

June 13

I'm dictating this under great emotional strain. I've walked out on the whole thing. I'm on a plane headed back to New York alone, and I have no idea what I'm going to do when I get there.

At first, I admit, I was in awe at the picture of an in­ternational convention of scientists and scholars, gathered for an exchange of ideas. Here, I thought, was where it all really happened. Here it would be different from the ster­ile college discussions, because these were the men on the highest levels of psychological research and education, the scientists who wrote the books and delivered the lectures, the authorities people quoted. If Nemur and Strauss were ordinary men working beyond their abilities, I felt sure it would be different with the others.

When it was time for the meeting, Nemur steered us through the gigantic lobby with its heavy baroque furnish­ings and huge curving marble staircases, and we moved through the thickening knots of handshakers, nodders, and smilers. Two other professors from Beekman who had arrived in Chicago just this morning joined us. Professors 'White and Clinger walked a little to the right and a step or two behind Nemur and Strauss, while Burt and I brought up the rear.

Standees parted to make a path for us into the Grand Ballroom, and Nemur waved to the reporters and photog­raphers who had come to hear at first hand about the startling things that had been done with a retardate adult in just a little over three months.

Nemur had obviously sent out advance publicity releases.

Some of the psychological papers delivered at the meeting were impressive. A group from Alaska showed how stimulation of various portions of the brain caused a significant development in learning ability, and a group from New Zealand had mapped out those portions of the brain that controlled perception and retention of stimuli.

But there were other kinds of papers too—P. T. Zeller-man's study on the difference in the length of time it took white rats to learn a maze when the corners were curved rather than angular, or Worfels paper on the effect of intelligence level on the reaction-time of rhesus monkeys.

Papers like these made me angry. Money, time, and energy squandered on the detailed analysis of the trivial. Burt was right when he praised Nemur and Strauss for devoting themselves to something important and uncertain