Page 125 - The Story of My Lif

INTRODUCTION

Helen Keller’s letters are important, not only as a supplementary story of her
life, but as a demonstration of her growth in thought and expression—the growth
which in itself has made her distinguished.

These letters are, however, not merely remarkable as the productions of a deaf
and blind girl, to be read with wonder and curiosity; they are good letters almost

from the first. The best passages are those in which she talks about herself, and
gives her world in terms of her experience of it. Her views on the precession of
the equinoxes are not important, but most important are her accounts of what
speech meant to her, of how she felt the statues, the dogs, the chickens at the
poultry show, and how she stood in the aisle of St. Bartholomew’s and felt the
organ rumble. Those are passages of which one would ask for more. The reason
they are comparatively few is that all her life she has been trying to be “like
other people,” and so she too often describes things not as they appear to her, but
as they appear to one with eyes and ears.

One cause for the excellence of her letters is the great number of them. They are
the exercises which have trained her to write.

She has lived at different times in different parts of the country, and so has been
separated from most of her friends and relatives. Of her friends, many have been
distinguished people, to whom—not often, I think, at the sacrifice of spontaneity
—she has felt it necessary to write well. To them and to a few friends with whom
she is in closest sympathy she writes with intimate frankness whatever she is
thinking about. Her naive retelling of a child’s tale she has heard, like the story
of “Little Jakey,”

which she rehearses for Dr. Holmes and Bishop Brooks, is charming and her
grave paraphrase of the day’s lesson in geography or botany, her parrot-like
repetition of what she has heard, and her conscious display of new words, are
delightful and instructive; for they show not only what she was learning, but
how, by putting it all into letters, she made the new knowledge and the new