o light. No sound. She lived in a darkness of silent desperation
and terrifying isolation that enveloped her whole being. Close your
eyes. Plug your ears, so that you can't hear anything. That was
what existence was for Helen Keller.
She compared herself to a shipwrecked sea captain who has to learn
a new language just to get back to society and the mainland. Roger
Shattuck, who wrote the forward to the most comprehensive edition
of her autobiography, The Story of My Life, placed
her journey through disability "next to the epic of Odysseus finding
his way home and to Columbus finding his way to the new world."
She went from being a child-blind, deaf, and so isolated from the
world around her that she would descend into depths of rage-to being
a woman of such compassion, vision, intellectual stature, and personal
achievement that world leaders sought her counsel, friendship, and
affection.
One cannot imagine the horror and overwhelming sadness she confronted
when she first realized she was so separate. She reports in her
memoirs that it happened at five years old. She was standing between
two close friends, feeling their lips and faces as they spoke to
one another, when it dawned on her that there was an entire world
of communication, connection, and meaning to which she didn't have
a key....
