July 16, 2010

• algernon life

  Do you remember the book Flowers for Algernon? We read it in junior high, and it's about this mentally handicapped man who goes through an experimental procedure and rapidly becomes a genius, then has to watch as the effects of the procedure wear off, and he reverts, conscious all the while, of his descent back to his previous state.

  It's one of those books I refer to a lot in conversation, mostly in a joking way, when talking about things that I used to know or be able to do, that I am no longer able to remember or understand. For instance, reading my college honors thesis for economics and East Asian Studies, which focused on a statistical analysis of a huge data set to extract results about "Migrants, Migration Choice, and Returns to Education in 1980's China," is always a "Flowers for Algernon moment." Did I really write that? Did I know what I was talking about? How did I figure out all the statistics and econometrics? How did I get the statistics program to run the regressions that I wanted to run (and how did I know what regressions I wanted to run in the first place)? How did I know that my results were robust? I can read the thesis now, all 80-some pages of it, but I can't really connect it to much of anything that is still in my brain and in use these days.

  Looking back, there are a lot of things I used to be able to do or understand or remember that have just gone their Algernon ways, partly crowded out by other skills or knowledge, but partly just rusted and abandoned on blocks in the overgrown weeds of my mind. Childhood and youth are times of endless expansion, mental frontierism, exploration of new territories, and I think that as a child, I was always very curious, perhaps too curious for my own good. Is that something that we lose as we get older? Do we lose the curiosity itself, or do we lose the time and energy to be curious? Does all the grownup stuff -- commuting, paying bills, buying toilet paper, filing taxes, sorting through junk mail -- replace the pioneering mental adventures we had when we were young?

  Just some of the many things (some of which aren't actually skills or knowledge, but whose loss I mourn nonetheless, and have therefore added to the list, despite the fact that they don't really belong on this kind of list) I have lost to the Algernon phenomenon, and the times in which I had them:

  • Preschool/kindergarten: The ability to fall asleep easily, and to sleep through the night
  • Grade school: The ability to not care what I looked like; the feeling that the days and years stretched on forever, and that they would be full of unbelievable things; the freedom to play with boys without worrying that it might be misinterpreted
  • Junior high: The ability to diagram sentences (OK, this one isn't a big loss)
  • High school: Calculus; physics; chemistry; gel electrophoresis; being the biggest damn fish in the pond without even trying
  • College: Basic reading/writing in Chinese; statistics; econometrics; being able to sight-read and sing like it was my job
  • Post-college: Fluency in French
  • Law school: The ability to read thousands of pages of dense text in a week and regurgitate it for exams; a sense of where the road was taking me (I can no longer see any road, and mistrust any road I think I might see)
  • Real life: Basic German; the ability to sleep for fourteen hours at a time; the ability to face jet lag without severe repercussions

  • 2:05 pm
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