The Story of My Life, Helen Keller [e novels to read online .txt] 📗

called heaven, but that essentially it was a condition⁠—the fulfilment of the heart’s desire, the satisfaction of its wants; and that heaven existed wherever right was acknowledged, believed in, and loved.

She shrinks from the thought of death with evident dismay. Recently, on being shown a deer which had been killed by her brother, she was greatly distressed, and asked sorrowfully, “Why must everything die, even the fleet-footed deer?” At another time she asked, “Do you not think we would be very much happier always, if we did not have to die?” I said, “No; because, if there were no death, our world would soon be so crowded with living creatures that it would be impossible for any of them to live comfortably.” “But,” said Helen, quickly, “I think God could make some more worlds as well as He made this one.”

When friends have told her of the great happiness which awaits her in another life, she instantly asked: “How do you know, if you have not been dead?”

The literal sense in which she sometimes takes common words and idioms shows how necessary it is that we should make sure that she receives their correct meaning. When told recently that Hungarians were born musicians, she asked in surprise, “Do they sing when they are born?” When her friend added that some of the pupils he had seen in Budapest had more than one hundred tunes in their heads, she said, laughing, “I think their heads must be very noisy.” She sees the ridiculous quickly, and, instead of being seriously troubled by metaphorical language, she is often amused at her own too literal conception of its meaning.

Having been told that the soul was without form, she was much perplexed at David’s words, “He leadeth my soul.” “Has it feet? Can it walk? Is it blind?” she asked; for in her mind the idea of being led was associated with blindness.

Of all the subjects which perplex and trouble Helen, none distresses her so much as the knowledge of the existence of evil, and of the suffering which results from it. For a long time it was possible to keep this knowledge from her; and it will always be comparatively easy to prevent her from coming in personal contact with vice and wickedness. The fact that sin exists, and that great misery results from it, dawned gradually upon her mind as she understood more and more clearly the lives and experiences of those around her. The necessity of laws and penalties had to be explained to her. She found it very hard to reconcile the presence of evil in the world with the idea of God which had been presented to her mind.

One day she asked, “Does God take care of us all the time?” She was answered in the affirmative. “Then why did He let little sister fall this morning, and hurt her head so badly?” Another time she was asking about the power and goodness of God. She had been told of a terrible storm at sea, in which several lives were lost, and she asked, “Why did not God save the people if He can do all things?”

Surrounded by loving friends and the gentlest influences, as Helen had always been, she has, from the earliest stage of her intellectual enlightenment, willingly done right. She knows with unerring instinct what is right, and does it joyously. She does not think of one wrong act as harmless, of another as of no consequence, and of another as not intended. To her pure soul all evil is equally unlovely.

These passages from the paper Miss Sullivan prepared for the meeting at Chautauqua, in July, 1894, of the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, contain her latest written account of her methods.

You must not imagine that as soon as Helen grasped the idea that everything had a name she at once became mistress of the treasury of the English language, or that “her mental faculties emerged, full armed, from their then living tomb, as Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus,” as one of her enthusiastic admirers would have us believe. At first, the words, phrases and sentences which she used in expressing her thoughts were all reproductions of what we had used in conversation with her, and which her memory had unconsciously retained. And indeed, this is true of the language of all children. Their language is the memory of the language they hear spoken in their homes. Countless repetition of the conversation of daily life has impressed certain words and phrases upon their memories, and when they come to talk themselves, memory supplies the words they lisp. Likewise, the language of educated people is the memory of the language of books.

Language grows out of life, out of its needs and experiences. At first my little pupil’s mind was all but vacant. She had been living in a world she could not realize. Language and knowledge are indissolubly connected; they are interdependent. Good work in language presupposes and depends on a real knowledge of things. As soon as Helen grasped the idea that everything had a name, and that by means of the manual alphabet these names could be transmitted from one to another, I proceeded to awaken her further interest in the objects whose names she learned to spell with such evident joy. I never taught language for the purpose of teaching it; but invariably used language as a medium for the communication of thought; thus the learning of language was coincident with the acquisition of knowledge. In order to use language intelligently, one must have something to talk about, and having something to talk about is the result of having had experiences; no amount of language training will enable our little children to use language with ease and fluency unless they have something clearly in their minds which they wish to communicate, or unless we succeed in awakening in them a desire to know what is