A Question
Mar. 17th, 2011 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiat_knoxWhat would Odd John have done if he'd met Charlie Gordon?
The romantic in me would imagine Odd John would fix Charlie's head so it was as smart as he could be, and this time permanent.
If not, I'd like to imagine Odd John telling Charlie that no, it was nothing of his fault, that everything would be all right ... and then took him to where Odd John and the other children on the Island went, at the end of the story.
Having just read Flowers for Algernon once again, I found myself - yet again - howling with grief at the end. I think Odd John would have found it in him for compassion, if there'd been a crossover between Stapledon's work and Daniel Keyes'.
After all, smart people - truly smart people - are vanishingly small in number. And no, I don't mean just people who can recite pi to a million digits, beat every Grandmaster in the room at chess and still compose a new piece of classical music. That's not really being smart - not the application of fluid knowledge to solve a problem. That's just the application of existing frozen knowledge: the value of pi, the moves of chess pieces across the board, the rules of musical composition, the established rules of English grammar and syntax and so on.
Scuse me. I feel a crying jag coming back on again. Flowers for Algernon can leave me bawling for hours.
The romantic in me would imagine Odd John would fix Charlie's head so it was as smart as he could be, and this time permanent.
If not, I'd like to imagine Odd John telling Charlie that no, it was nothing of his fault, that everything would be all right ... and then took him to where Odd John and the other children on the Island went, at the end of the story.
Having just read Flowers for Algernon once again, I found myself - yet again - howling with grief at the end. I think Odd John would have found it in him for compassion, if there'd been a crossover between Stapledon's work and Daniel Keyes'.
After all, smart people - truly smart people - are vanishingly small in number. And no, I don't mean just people who can recite pi to a million digits, beat every Grandmaster in the room at chess and still compose a new piece of classical music. That's not really being smart - not the application of fluid knowledge to solve a problem. That's just the application of existing frozen knowledge: the value of pi, the moves of chess pieces across the board, the rules of musical composition, the established rules of English grammar and syntax and so on.
Scuse me. I feel a crying jag coming back on again. Flowers for Algernon can leave me bawling for hours.
