Lessons from Charly and Algernon

I just finished reading Flowers for Algernon, it's an old book. A movie was made out of it in the late 60's which won a few Oscars. It's about a retarded man who through a scientific experiment and surgery turned into a genius. Algernon is the lab rat (like literally, a rat!) who was experimented on before Charly. As the rat Algernon's genius disintegrates into a kind of psychosis, seemingly plunging into death, Charly must use his new genius to conquer his own fears, his painful memories of the past, and his need to understand what went wrong with the experiment, knowing that he will soon follow Algernon's fate. Though the novel's premise might seem to be too sci-fi, it's not. I loved it actually. There were lessons to be gleamed here.

That genius or mere intelligence and power are not what makes one happy. It's a fallacy we all grew up with. That we can be happier if we were brighter, if we could be a bit higher in the totem pole. Truth is, sometimes it's genius and power, or how we deal with these, that make us isolated from other people. And here is the discovery, that what most of us want really, retardate or genius, street sweeper or president, all we need is to feel that we connect with other people. That someone cares for us enough, that our words have some weight to others. Even when I shut myself in my room to write, It is because I want to share my thoughts, that maybe someone out there would read it and understand, who'd know from his or her own life experience what I'm talking about.

There's also the limiting (or delimiting) nature of time. We all know that things that end. But why is it that the things that we so long to go on forever go first, disappearing before we can even utter a protest? The new Charly fell in love with someone, and in that short time he felt happy, and yet he had to ready himself and his love of the inevitability of its ending. Alice, Charly's love said something along these lines: I know that it will end soon, and you'll go back to who you were before and by that time I'll do everything to forget you but for now, we have no reason not to make the most out of it. It is true, I know it only because life has taught me too to use these words myself. I used to be so sad about these endings. Being an outsider looking into those tragic fates but now I realize this. We all go through pains like these. Terrible things really, especially when you're under the eye of the storm but we always have it in us to survive. There are decisions to be made in life, hard, life changing. And sometimes they will not lead us to joy, not at first, but eventually we learn to be happy with what we can be happy with. We adapt ourselves, change our perspective, our demands, our preconceptions of what can make us happy.