The Story of My Life, Helen Keller's first autobiography, is one-hundred years old. Cynthia Ozick offers a wonderful reminder in the New Yorker of why this work - and Keller's life - remain important:
" Yet the story of her life is not the good she did, the panegyrics she inspired, or the disputes (genuine or counterfeit? victim or victimizer?) that stormed around her. The most persuasive story of Helen Keller’s life is what she said it was: 'I observe, I feel, I think, I imagine.' She was an artist. She imagined." 'Blindness has no limiting effect upon mental vision,' she argued again and again. 'My intellectual horizon is infinitely wide. The universe it encircles is immeasurable.' And, like any writer making imagination’s mysterious claims before the material-minded, she had cause to cry out, 'Oh, the supercilious doubters!'
Nevertheless, she was a warrior in a vaster and more vexing conflict. Do we know only what we see, or do we see what we somehow already know? Are we more than the sum of our senses? Does a picture—whatever strikes the retina—engender thought, or does thought create the picture? Can there be subjectivity without an object to glance off? Theorists have their differing notions, to which the ungraspable organism that is Helen Keller is a retort. She is not an advocate for one side or the other in the ancient debate concerning the nature of the real. She is not a philosophical or neurological or therapeutic topic. She stands for enigma; there lurks in her still the angry child who demanded to be understood yet could not be deciphered. She refutes those who cannot perceive, or do not care to value, what is hidden from sensation: collective memory, heritage, literature.
" Helen Keller’s lot, it turns out, was not unique. 'We work in the dark,' Henry James affirmed, on behalf of his own art; and so did she. It was the same dark. She knew her Wordsworth: 'Visionary power / Attends the motions of the viewless winds, / Embodied in the mystery of words: / There, darkness makes abode.' She vivified Keats’s phantom theme of negative capability, the poet’s oarless casting about for the hallucinatory shadows of desire. She fought the debunkers who, for the sake of a spurious honesty, would denude her of landscape and return her to the marble cell. She fought the literalists who took imagination for mendacity, who meant to disinherit her, and everyone, of poetry. Her legacy, after all, is an epistemological marker of sorts: proof of the real existence of the mind’s eye. "
The whole piece is worth both the time and the stirring of your soul.
Of further autobiographical interest, I went to the same preparatory school that Helen did. The Cambridge School has changed somewhat over the years, becoming coeducational and moving out to Weston, Ma, but the spirit that encouraged the unique gifts of Helen Keller continues. My best friend, severely dyslexic and functionally illiterate at age fourteen, has read a book a week since eighteen. For that alone, the school has my undying love.
Of further historical interest, the founder of the Cambridge School, and its principal while Helen Keller was in attendance, was Arthur Gilman, who had been involved in the founding of Radcliffe College, and began the school as a preparatory for Radcliffe (this Gilman is not the same as the notable architect - designer of Boston's Back Bay - of the same name who was contemporary). Our Mr Gilman, educator of Helen Keller (one of the few people who ever bothered to learn Ms Keller's sign system), was the author of several books, including Shakespeare's Morals: Suggestive Selections, with Brief Collateral Readings and Scriptural References, wherein he concludes that the high-minded and noble instruction of the Bard's drama, the eternal and beautiful lesson to be drawn forth from the sublime poetry of our language's greatest master, is simply "know your place and do not be ambitious".
It is the soul of sense, when your principles have been confounded by your experience, to change your mind for the betterment of the world (or your own small part of it).
Posted by Martial