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

epub:type="se:name.publication.short-story">The Frost King” was building better than she knew and saying more than she meant.

Whoever makes a sentence of words utters not his wisdom, but the wisdom of the race whose life is in the words, though they have never been so grouped before. The man who can write stories thinks of stories to write. The medium calls forth the thing it conveys, and the greater the medium the deeper the thoughts.

The educated man is the man whose expression is educated. The substance of thought is language, and language is the one thing to teach the deaf child and every other child. Let him get language and he gets the very stuff that language is made of, the thought and the experience of his race. The language must be one used by a nation, not an artificial thing. Volapük is a paradox, unless one has French or English or German or some other language that has grown up in a nation. The deaf child who has only the sign language of De l’Épée is an intellectual Philip Nolan, an alien from all races, and his thoughts are not the thoughts of an Englishman, or a Frenchman, or a Spaniard. The Lord’s prayer in signs is not the Lord’s prayer in English.

In his essay on style De Quincey says that the best English is to be found in the letters of the cultivated gentlewoman, because she has read only a few good books and has not been corrupted by the style of newspapers and the jargon of street, marketplace, and assembly hall.

Precisely these outward circumstances account for Helen Keller’s use of English. In the early years of her education she had only good things to read; some were, indeed, trivial and not excellent in style, but not one was positively bad in manner or substance. This happy condition has obtained throughout her life. She has been nurtured on imaginative literature, and she has gathered from it into her vigorous and tenacious memory the style of great writers. “A new word opens its heart to me,” she writes in a letter; and when she uses the word its heart is still open. When she was twelve years old, she was asked what book she would take on a long railroad journey. Paradise Lost, she answered, and she read it on the train.

Until the last year or two she has not been master of her style, rather has her style been master of her. It is only since she has made composition a more conscious study that she has ceased to be the victim of the phrase; the lucky victim, fortunately, of the good phrase.

When in 1892, she was encouraged to write a sketch of her life for the Youth’s Companion, in the hope that it would reassure her and help her to recover from the effect of “The Frost King,” she produced a piece of composition which is much more remarkable and in itself more entertaining at some points than the corresponding part of her story in this book. When she came to retell the story in a fuller form, the echo was still in her mind of the phrases she had written nine years before. Yet she had not seen her sketch in the Youth’s Companion since she wrote it, except two passages which Miss Sullivan read to her to remind her of things she should say in this autobiography, and to show her, when her phrasing troubled her, how much better she did as a little girl.

From the early sketch I take a few passages which seem to me, without making very much allowance for difference in time, almost as good as anything she has written since:

I discovered the true way to walk when I was a year old, and during the radiant summer days that followed I was never still a minute.⁠ ⁠…

Then when my father came in the evening, I would run to the gate to meet him, and he would take me up in his strong arms and put back the tangled curls from my face and kiss me many times, saying, “What has my Little Woman been doing today?”

But the brightest summer has winter behind it. In the cold, dreary month of February, when I was nineteen months old, I had a serious illness. I still have confused memories of that illness. My mother sat beside my little bed and tried to soothe my feverish moans while in her troubled heart she prayed, “Father in Heaven, spare my baby’s life!” But the fever grew and flamed in my eyes, and for several days my kind physician thought I would die.

But early one morning the fever left me as mysteriously and unexpectedly as it had come, and I fell into a quiet sleep. Then my parents knew I would live, and they were very happy. They did not know for some time after my recovery that the cruel fever had taken my sight and hearing; taken all the light and music and gladness out of my little life.

But I was too young to realize what had happened. When I awoke and found that all was dark and still, I suppose I thought it was night, and I must have wondered why day was so long coming. Gradually, however, I got used to the silence and darkness that surrounded me, and forgot that it had ever been day.

I forgot everything that had been except my mother’s tender love. Soon even my childish voice was stilled, because I had ceased to hear any sound.

But all was not lost! After all, sight and hearing are but two of the beautiful blessings which God had given me. The most precious, the most wonderful of His gifts was still mine. My mind remained clear and active, “though fled fore’er the light.”

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