Of Mice and Mensa

Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes, is fully a character driven novel. It has a plot, but a fairly unexciting one. The novel explores the academic’s greatest wish and greatest fear; fore one’s intelligence to increase or to diminish respectively. The book is heavily laced with references to Plato’s states of being and becoming; how much is reality and how much is just shadows o a wall. In spite of a lot of heavy handed moralizing aimed at erudites and pedants and other people who know what erudites and pedants are, Keyes’ work is quite enjoyable and requires minimal suspension of disbelief. I’ll grant that there are way too many women lasciviously throwing themselves at the narrator, but there seems to be too much sex in all character driven novels. How else is the author to keep his reader entertained without any real action?
Anyone, sufficiently self-conscience, will recognize his or her own intelligence as an are that could stand improvement1. Nobody is supremely intelligent, though we’d like to be. It’s embarrassing to say “I don’t know” or “that’s not my field of expertise” or “I’ve forgotten more than you’ve ever learned.” This last one was a favorite of my Mom’s, though she gave it up on me when I started using words that she’d never heard before. I’ve even written several posts about my dissatisfaction with my own ability to retain what I learn in the classroom. Professors that I’ve asked about this tell me that it’s normal; that the sort of retention I seek comes only after several years of teaching the material. Even so, it’s still embarrassing to say “I forget."

1. I've found the application of caffeine to do wonders for mental acuity.