Flowers for Algernon: Progress Reports 14–15

As I see him now, he is not really afraid, just withdrawing, as a bird or squirrel backs off from the brusque movements of the feeder—involuntary, instinctive.

The light through that door ajar comes to me again in luminous vision.

Three overstuffed chairs and a mangy green couch were piled high with discarded clothing...

It’s better up here away from the phonies and the dilettantes.

“I surrender is too much of a cliché. How about: Life is just a box of mazes?”

Watching him move, adroit for such a short, heavy man, I felt guilty at the deception.

I tried to keep my composure.

Nothing in our minds is ever really gone. The operation had covered him over with a veneer of education and culture, but emotionally he was there—watching and waiting.

I longed to reach out for her, but I knew it was futile.

The whistles and catcalls from the customers (cries of “hey, there go the profits!”...“Mazel tov!”...and “well, he didn’t work here very long...” which invariably seems to follow the breaking of dishware in a public restaurant) confused him.

I have often reread my early progress reports and seen the illiteracy, the childish naïveté, the mind of low intelligence peering from a dark room, through the keyhole, at the dazzling light outside.

I can’t help but admire the structural linguists who have carved out for themselves a linguistic discipline based on the deterioration of written communication.

Well, as I say, he appeared cordial, and willing to suspend judgment.

“I’m sure that from the beginning you planned for all exigencies. So what happens to me?”

That evening and for the next few days I immersed myself in psychology texts: clinical, personality, psychometrics, learning, experimental psychology, animal psychology, physiological psychology, behaviorist, gestalt, analytical, functional, dynamic, organismic, and all the rest of the ancient and modern factions, schools, and systems of thought.