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    The World I Live In
    The World I Live In
    The World I Live In
    Ebook99 pages2 hours

    The World I Live In

    By Helen Keller

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    Helen Keller (1880-1968) was an American author, lecturer, and political activist. At nineteen months, she suffered an illness that left her deaf, blind, and eventually mute. Helen remained in a lonely state of sensory deprivation until she reached the age of six, when Anne Sullivan (also visually impaired) was employed by the Keller family to tutor her. As a member of the Socialist Party of America and the Wobblies, Helen campaigned for women's suffrage, worker's rights, and socialism, as well as many other leftist causes. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. After her 1904 graduation from Radcliffe with honors in German and English, Helen wrote profusely, completing a total of 12 published books and numerous articles. "The World I live In" (1908) offers Helen's remarkable insight of the world's beauty perceived through the sensations of touch, smell, and vibration, together with the workings of a powerful imagination. It is her most personal and intellectually adventurous work that transforms a reader's appreciation for her extraordinary achievements.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateFeb 1, 2012
    ISBN9781420944969
    Author

    Helen Keller

    Helen Keller would not be bound by conditions. Rendered deaf and blind at 19 months by scarlet fever, she learned to read (in several languages) and even speak, eventually graduating with honors from Radcliffe College in 1904, where as a student she wrote The Story of My Life. That she accomplished all of this in an age when few women attended college and the disabled were often relegated to the background, spoken of only in hushed tones, is remarkable. But Keller's many other achievements are impressive by any standard: she authored 13 books, wrote countless articles, and devoted her life to social reform. An active and effective suffragist, pacifist, and socialist (the latter association earned her an FBI file), she lectured on behalf of disabled people everywhere. She also helped start several foundations that continue to improve the lives of the deaf and blind around the world.

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    Reviews for The World I Live In

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Keller's most distinctive message is that she is capable of accessing the world with the senses she possesses, even that she sees things that sighted and hearing individuals don't notice, such as the delicate nuances of touch and smell. It's a bit heavy prose wise but very skilled at times.

    Book preview

    The World I Live In - Helen Keller

    THE WORLD I LIVE IN

    BY HELEN KELLER

    A Digireads.com Book

    Digireads.com Publishing

    Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4440-2

    Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4496-9

    This edition copyright © 2012

    Please visit www.digireads.com

    TO

    HENRY H. ROGERS

    MY DEAR FRIEND OF

    MANY YEARS

    PREFACE

    The essays and the poem in this book appeared originally in the Century Magazine, the essays under the titles A Chat About the Hand, Sense and Sensibility, and My Dreams. Mr. Gilder suggested the articles, and I thank him for his kind interest and encouragement. But he must also accept the responsibility which goes with my gratitude. For it is owing to his wish and that of other editors that I talk so much about myself.

    Every book is in a sense autobiographical. But while other self-recording creatures are permitted at least to seem to change the subject, apparently nobody cares what I think of the tariff, the conservation of our natural resources, or the conflicts which revolve about the name of Dreyfus. If I offer to reform the education system of the world, my editorial friends say, That is interesting. But will you please tell us what idea you had of goodness and beauty when you were six years old? First they ask me to tell the life of the child who is mother to the woman. Then they make me my own daughter and ask for an account of grown-up sensations. Finally I am requested to write about my dreams, and thus I become an anachronical grandmother; for it is the special privilege of old age to relate dreams. The editors are so kind that they are no doubt right in thinking that nothing I have to say about the affairs of the universe would be interesting. But until they give me opportunity to write about matters that are not-me, the world must go on uninstructed and unreformed, and I can only do my best with the one small subject upon which I am allowed to discourse.

    In The Chant of Darkness I did not intend to set up as a poet. I thought I was writing prose, except for the magnificent passage from Job which I was paraphrasing. But this part seemed to my friends to separate itself from the exposition, and I made it into a kind of poem.

    H. K.

    CONTENTS

    PREFACE

    I. THE SEEING HAND

    II. THE HANDS OF OTHERS

    III. THE HAND OF THE RACE

    IV. THE POWER OF TOUCH

    V. THE FINER VIBRATIONS

    VI. SMELL, THE FALLEN ANGEL

    VII. RELATIVE VALUES OF THE SENSES

    VIII. THE FIVE-SENSED WORLD

    IX. INWARD VISIONS

    X. ANALOGIES IN SENSE PERCEPTION

    XI. BEFORE THE SOUL DAWN

    XII. THE LARGER SANCTIONS

    XIII. THE DREAM WORLD

    XIV. DREAMS AND REALITY

    XV. A WAKING DREAM

    A CHANT OF DARKNESS

    I. THE SEEING HAND

    I have just touched my dog. He was rolling on the grass, with pleasure in every muscle and limb. I wanted to catch a picture of him in my fingers, and I touched him as lightly as I would cobwebs; but lo, his fat body revolved, stiffened and solidified into an upright position, and his tongue gave my hand a lick! He pressed close to me, as if he were fain to crowd himself into my hand. He loved it with his tail, with his paw, with his tongue. If he could speak, I believe he would say with me that paradise is attained by touch; for in touch is all love and intelligence.

    This small incident started me on a chat about hands, and if my chat is fortunate I have to thank my dog-star. In any case, it is pleasant to have something to talk about that no one else has monopolized; it is like making a new path in the trackless woods, blazing the trail where no foot has pressed before. I am glad to take you by the hand and lead you along an untrodden way into a world where the hand is supreme. But at the very outset we encounter a difficulty. You are so accustomed to light, I fear you will stumble when I try to guide you through the land of darkness and silence. The blind are not supposed to be the best of guides. Still, though I cannot warrant not to lose you, I promise that you shall not be led into fire or water, or fall into a deep pit. If you will follow me patiently, you will find that there's a sound so fine, nothing lives 'twixt it and silence, and that there is more meant in things than meets the eye.

    My hand is to me what your hearing and sight together are to you. In large measure we travel the same highways, read the same books, speak the same language, yet our experiences are different. All my comings and goings turn on the hand as on a pivot. It is the hand that binds me to the world of men and women. The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter. With the dropping of a little word from another's hand into mine, a slight flutter of the fingers, began the intelligence, the joy, the fullness of my life. Like Job, I feel as if a hand had made me, fashioned me together round about and moulded my very soul.

    In all my experiences and thoughts I am conscious of a hand. Whatever moves me, whatever thrills me, is as a hand that touches me in the dark, and that touch is my reality. You might as well say that a sight which makes you glad, or a blow which brings the stinging tears to your eyes, is unreal as to say that those impressions are unreal which I have accumulated by means of touch. The delicate tremble of a butterfly's wings in my hand, the soft petals of violets curling in the cool folds of their leaves or lifting sweetly out of the meadow-grass, the clear, firm outline of face and limb, the smooth arch of a horse's neck and the velvety touch of his nose—all these, and a thousand resultant combinations, which take shape in my mind, constitute my world.

    Ideas make the world we live in, and impressions furnish ideas. My world is built of touch-sensations, devoid of physical colour and sound; but without colour and sound it breathes and throbs with life. Every object is associated in my mind with tactual qualities which, combined in countless ways, give me a sense of power, of beauty, or of incongruity: for with my hands I can feel the comic as well as the beautiful in the outward appearance of things. Remember that you, dependent on your sight, do not realize how many things are tangible. All palpable things are mobile or rigid, solid or liquid, big or small, warm or cold, and these qualities are variously modified. The coolness of a water-lily rounding into bloom is different from the coolness of an evening wind in summer, and different again from the coolness of the rain that soaks into the hearts of growing things and gives them life and body. The velvet of the rose is not that of a ripe peach or of a baby's dimpled cheek. The hardness of the rock is to the hardness of wood what a man's deep bass is to a woman's voice when it is low. What I call beauty I find in certain combinations of all these qualities, and is largely derived from the flow of curved and straight lines which is over all things.

    What does the straight line mean to you? I think you will ask.

    It means several things. It symbolizes duty. It seems

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