Last night we watched Charly – an old movie based on the story Flowers for Algernon.
Charly was a severely regarded man with a happy disposition who calls coworkers who make fun of him his “best friends” and goes about his life with a childlike innocence, impervious to the cruelty of others. He had an opportunity to undergo an operation that would increase his mental capacity, based on the success of the operation in a mouse called Algernon. It takes a short while but Charly transforms from a slow-witted, taking-everything-literally person to a highly intelligent, capable-of-reading-simultaneous-subtexts person.
The first thing Charly realizes is the cruelty of others, and he wonders how people who would never laugh at a crippled man will make fun of a regarded one (“a moron”).
He faces his first loss as an intelligent man – “friends” – but I think he is really grieving over his loss of innocence – because those people who laughed at his expense were never his real friends to begin with. Still, the world opened up to Charly where his analytical prowess and knowledge mastery surpasses his teacher and even the doctors who performed the operation on him.
Eventually Charly finds out that Algernon has regressed, which means Charly too, will regress to the person he used to be. Charly isolates himself as he prepares for the inevitable decline of his intelligence and a life once again as a retarded man.
So Cass asked if I were put in Charly’s position would I want to do the operation knowing that I will lose that intelligence.
I didn’t think very long to say “yes I would.” It is not even because I am enamored by “all that I would come to know” because at the beginning for Charly, that knowledge brought tremendous pain – knowing that your friends were not really your friends, knowing how the world would unfold based on human nature and shortsightedness of some, knowing that the world discriminates and that people can be cruel.
I was driven more by “not wanting to regret” the chance of knowing what I could know even if I will eventually lose that knowledge. It’s not much different from the logic that I would rather love and lose than never love at all. I have come to a conclusion that my decision is becoming based more on my knowing that when the time comes, I will survive through it, and therefore I could take the risk of loss. It is when I am scared that I cannot survive the pain that I fear dying. I am still scared of pain, of course, but not of dying itself.
I think what I am most drawn to is the possibility that I can see all
the ugliness and beauty of humanity and the world side by side and
still come to love human beings. This then makes the deepest reaches
of knowledge desirable.
