Kayan : 2/26 : Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

I spent Thanksgiving 2006 with Y and his family in L.A.. Stepping inside His Childhood Home, it was like stepping into Bizarro My Childhood Home: the layout, the choice of furniture, the warm homey feel, the knick-knacks parents like to keep around.

Making myself at home right away, I mozied on upstairs and checked out Y and his brother's rooms. JUST LIKE MY PARENTS, his parents had put the family computer into the eldest son's room, and have converted the second child's into a guest room * by putting two twin beds side by side * exactly the same way my parents have done.

Y thinks I'm making more of a deal about these similarities than warranted. But to me it was an overwhelming sense of how suburbia is all the same across the country; that we have more in common than we have differences.

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Ah right. The book. So I helped myself to Y's high school bookshelves and plucked out this one amongst all the other high school required readings. I know I must've read this in high school, and remember vaguely what the book was about (about as much as you're remembering right now).

As someone who's been thinking about the human mind a lot lately, one moment of the book jumped out at me: Mentally developmentally challenged Charlie Gordon had undergone surgery to make him smarter. He is now a genius. But his emotional intelligence has not caught up. Charlie Gordon makes the observation that we can have all the intelligence in the world, but without a human connection to others, we are not really living.

This is something I have considered. For example, I love reading and interpreting the application of the Holy Bible to everyday life. But I once met a theology student who knows the Word really well, but is completely inept at expressing it in applicable, real-life terms. As I embark on studies in psychology and continue to study the Bible, I am now more watchful for continued connectivity to people.