Flowers for Algernon: Progress Reports 16-17

The feeling of cold grayness was everywhere around me—a sense of resignation.

There had been no talk of rehabilitation, of cure, of someday sending these people out into the world again. No one had spoken of hope.

He has moments out of his lethargy. Periodically, he will run a shifting maze, but when he fails and finds himself in a dead-end, he reacts violently.

When he found himself moving along the unfamiliar path, he slowed down, and his actions became erratic: start, pause, double back, turn around and then forward again, until finally he was in the cul-de-sac that informed him with a mild shock that he had made a mistake.

When I picked him up, he made no attempt to uncurl, but remained in that state much like a catatonic stupor.

It's as if all the knowledge I’ve soaked in during the past months has coalesced and lifted me to a peak of light and understanding.

I’ve gone as far as I can on a conscious level, and now it’s up to those mysterious operations below the level of awareness. It’s one of those inexplicable things, how everything I’ve learned and experienced is brought to bear on the problem.

It was in honor of the two men on the board of the Welberg Foundation who had been instrumental in getting her husband the grant.

The humble, self-effacing Charlie you were all talking about a while ago is just waiting patiently. I’ll admit I’m like him in a number of ways, but humility and self-effacement are not among them. I’ve learned how little they get a person in this world.

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.

It is my own feeling that the most successful line of research will be that taken by the men studying enzyme imbalances. As with so many other things, time is the key factor—speed in discovering the deficiency, and speed in administering hormonal substitutes.

Compared to the normal brain, Algernon's had decreased in weight and there was a general smoothing out of the cerebral convolutions as well as a deepening and broadening of brain fissures.

Some houses had boarded up windows, and others looked more like patched-up shanties than homes.

“Don’t cry, Norma. Everything will work out all right.” I heard myself speaking in reassuring platitudes.

“Why do you want me to be angry with you?”
I sighed. “Stolid Strauss—unmovable. I’ll tell you something. I’m sick and tired of coming here. What’s the sense of therapy any more? You know as well as I do what’s going to happen.”