The Story of My Life, Helen Keller [best book recommendations .txt] 📗

As soon as my strength returned, I began to take an interest in what the people around me were doing. I would cling to my mother’s dress as she went about her household duties, and my little hands felt every object and observed every motion, and in this way I learned a great many things.

When I was a little older I felt the need of some means of communication with those around me, and I began to make simple signs which my parents and friends readily understood; but it often happened that I was unable to express my thoughts intelligibly, and at such times I would give way to my angry feelings utterly….

Teacher had been with me nearly two weeks, and I had learned eighteen or twenty words, before that thought flashed into my mind, as the sun breaks upon the sleeping world; and in that moment of illumination the secret of language was revealed to me, and I caught a glimpse of the beautiful country I was about to explore.

Teacher had been trying all the morning to make me understand that the mug and the milk in the mug had different names; but I was very dull, and kept spelling MILK for mug, and mug for milk until teacher must have lost all hope of making me see my mistake. At last she got up, gave me the mug, and led me out of the door to the pump-house. Some one was pumping water, and as the cool fresh stream burst forth, teacher made me put my mug under the spout and spelled “w-a-t-e-r,” Water!

That word startled my soul, and it awoke, full of the spirit of the morning, full of joyous, exultant song. Until that day my mind had been like a darkened chamber, waiting for words to enter and light the lamp, which is thought….

I learned a great many words that day. I do not remember what they all were; but I do know that MOTHER, FATHER, SISTER and TEACHER were among them. It would have been difficult to find a happier little child than I was that night as I lay in my crib and thought over the joy the day had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come.

The next morning I awoke with joy in my heart. Everything I touched seemed to quiver with life. It was because I saw everything with the new, strange, beautiful sight which had been given me. I was never angry after that because I understood what my friends said to me, and I was very busy learning many wonderful things. I was never still during the first glad days of my freedom. I was continually spelling and acting out the words as I spelled them. I would run, skip, jump and swing, no matter where I happened to be. Everything was budding and blossoming.

The honeysuckle hung in long garlands, deliciously fragrant, and the roses had never been so beautiful before. Teacher and I lived out-of-doors from morning until night, and I rejoiced greatly in the forgotten light and sunshine found again….

The morning after our arrival I awoke bright and early. A beautiful summer day had dawned, the day on which I was to make the acquaintance of a somber and mysterious friend. I got up, and dressed quickly and ran downstairs. I met Teacher in the hall, and begged to be taken to the sea at once. “Not yet,” she responded, laughing. “We must have breakfast first.” As soon as breakfast was over we hurried off to the shore. Our pathway led through low, sandy hills, and as we hastened on, I often caught my feet in the long, coarse grass, and tumbled, laughing, in the warm, shining sand. The beautiful, warm air was peculiarly fragrant, and I noticed it got cooler and fresher as we went on.

Suddenly we stopped, and I knew, without being told, the Sea was at my feet. I knew, too, it was immense! awful! and for a moment some of the sunshine seemed to have gone out of the day. But I do not think I was afraid; for later, when I had put on my bathing-suit, and the little waves ran up on the beach and kissed my feet, I shouted for joy, and plunged fearlessly into the surf.

But, unfortunately, I struck my foot on a rock and fell forward into the cold water.

Then a strange, fearful sense of danger terrified me. The salt water filled my eyes, and took away my breath, and a great wave threw me up on the beach as easily as if I had been a little pebble. For several days after that I was very timid, and could hardly be persuaded to go in the water at all; but by degrees my courage returned, and almost before the summer was over, I thought it the greatest fun to be tossed about by the sea-waves….

I do not know whether the difference or the similarity in phrasing between the child’s version and the woman’s is the more remarkable. The early story is simpler and shows less deliberate artifice, though even then Miss Keller was prematurely conscious of style, but the art of the later narrative, as in the passage about the sea, or the passage on the medallion of Homer, is surely a fulfilment of the promise of the early story. It was in these early days that Dr. Holmes wrote to her: “I am delighted with the style of your letters. There is no affectation about them, and as they come straight from your heart, so they go straight to mine.”

In the years when she was growing out of childhood, her style lost its early simplicity and became stiff and, as she says, “periwigged.” In these years the fear came many times to Miss Sullivan lest the success of the child was to cease with childhood. At times Miss Keller seemed to lack flexibility, her thoughts ran in set phrases which she seemed to have no power to revise or turn over in new ways.

Then came the work in college—original theme writing with new ideals of composition or at least new methods of suggesting those ideals. Miss Keller began to get the better of her old friendly taskmaster, the phrase. This book, her first mature experiment in writing, settles the question of her ability to write.

The style of the Bible is everywhere in Miss Keller’s work, just as it is in the style of most great English writers. Stevenson, whom Miss Sullivan likes and used to read to her pupil, is another marked influence. In her autobiography are many quotations, chiefly from the Bible and Stevenson, distinct from the context or interwoven with it, the whole a fabric quite of her own design. Her vocabulary has all the phrases that other people use, and the explanation of it, and the reasonableness of it ought to be evident by this time. There is no reason why she should strike from her vocabulary all words of sound and vision.

Writing for other people, she should in many cases be true to outer fact rather than to her own experience. So long as she uses words correctly, she should be granted the privilege of using them freely, and not be expected to confine herself to a vocabulary true to her lack of sight and hearing. In her style, as in what she writes about, we must concede to the artist what we deny to the autobiographer. It should be explained, too, that LOOK and SEE are used by the blind, and HEAR by the deaf, for PERCEIVE; they are simple and more convenient words. Only a literal person could think of holding the blind to PERCEPTION or APPERCEPTION, when SEEING and LOOKING are so much easier, and have, moreover, in the speech of all men the meaning of intellectual recognition as well as recognition through the sense of sight. When Miss Keller examines a statue, she says in her natural idiom, as her fingers run over the marble, “It looks like a head of Flora.”

It is true, on the other hand, that in her descriptions, she is best from the point of view of art when she is faithful to her own sensations; and this is precisely true of all artists.

Her recent training has taught her to drop a good deal of her conventionality and to write about experiences in her life which are peculiar to her and which, like the storm in the wild cherry tree, mean most and call for the truest phrasing. She has learned more and more to give up the style she borrowed from books and tried to use, because she wanted to write like other people; she has learned that she is at her best when she “feels” the lilies sway; lets the roses press into her hands and speaks of the heat which to her means light.

Miss Keller’s autobiography contains almost everything that she ever intended to publish. It seems worth while, however, to quote from some of her chance bits of writing, which are neither so informal as her letters nor so carefully composed as her story of her life. These extracts are from her exercises in her course in composition, where she showed herself at the beginning of her college life quite without rival among her classmates. Mr.

Charles T. Copeland, who has been for many years instructor in English and Lecturer on English Literature at Harvard and Radcliffe, said to me: “In some of her work she has shown that she can write better than any pupil I ever had, man or woman. She has an excellent ‘ear’ for the flow of sentences.” The extracts follow:

A few verses of Omar Khayyam’s poetry have just been read to me, and I feel as if I had spent the last half-hour in a magnificent sepulcher. Yes, it is a tomb in which hope, joy and the power of acting nobly lie buried. Every beautiful description, every deep thought glides insensibly into the same mournful chant of the brevity of life, of the slow decay and dissolution of all earthly things. The poet’s bright, fond memories of love, youth and beauty are but the funeral torches shedding their light on this tomb, or to modify the image a little, they are the flowers that bloom on it, watered with tears and fed by a bleeding heart.

Beside the tomb sits a weary soul, rejoicing neither in the joys of the past nor in the possibilities of the future, but seeking consolation in forgetfulness. In vain the inspiring sea shouts to this languid soul, in vain the heavens strive with its weakness; it still persists in regretting and seeks a refuge in oblivion from the pangs of present woe. At times it catches some faint echo from the living, joyous, real world, a gleam of the perfection that is to be; and, thrilled out of its despondency, feels capable of working out a grand ideal even “in the poor, miserable, hampered actual,” wherein it is placed; but in a moment the inspiration, the vision is gone, and this great, much-suffering soul is again enveloped in the darkness of uncertainty and despair.

It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.

I often think that beautiful ideas embarrass most people as much as the company of great men. They are regarded generally as far more appropriate in books and in public discourses than in the parlor or at the table. Of course I do not refer to beautiful sentiments, but to