The World I Live In by Helen Keller — Read

SO, in the midst of life, eager, imperious life, the deaf-blind child, fettered to the bare rock of circumstance, spider-like, sends out gossamer threads of thought into the measureless void that surrounds him. Patiently he explores the dark, until he builds up a knowledge of the world he lives in, and his soul meets the beauty of the world, where the sun shines always, and the birds sing. To the blind child the dark is kindly. In it he finds nothing extraordinary or terrible. It is his familiar world; even the groping from place to place, the halting steps, the dependence upon others, do not seem strange to him. He does not know how many countless pleasures the dark shuts out from him. Not until he weighs his life in the scale of others' experience does he realize what it is to live forever in the dark. But the knowledge that teaches him this bitterness also brings its consolation -- spiritual light, the promise of the day that shall be.

The blind child -- the deaf-blind child -- has inherited the mind of seeing and hearing ancestors -- a mind measured to five senses. Therefore he must be influenced, even if it be unknown to himself, by the light, colour, song which have been transmitted through the language he is taught, for the chambers of the mind are ready to receive that language. The brain of the race is so permeated with colour that it dyes even the speech of the blind. Every object I think of is stained with the hue that belongs to it by association and memory. The experience of the deaf-blind person, in a world of seeing, hearing people, is like that of a sailor on an island where the inhabitants speak a language unknown to him, whose life is unlike that he has lived. He is one, they are many; there is no chance of compromise. He must learn to see with their eyes, to hear with their ears, to think their thoughts, to follow their ideals.