'The Story of My Life' - Helen Keller's Certain Slant

There are a handful of special writers whose works truly show us what it’s like to be a living, breathing human being. Shakespeare comes most quickly to mind, and among poets Emily Dickinson may come soon afterward in her ability to make us re-perceive that “certain slant of light” that we all feel so palpably as we turn through the universe. But the writers whom I’ve always felt to be the most penetrating and thorough in their explications of what it’s like to be us are the prose writers St. Augustine and Marcel Proust. These two writers explore the vast hall of memory and describe the sensations of human existence on a level that’s almost as profound as existence itself. Freud at his best can also show us what it’s like to feel and to perceive and to be human. Lately, though, my sense of self-existence has been most deeply illuminated by a writer who is currently much less celebrated—a writer who perhaps surpasses Augustine in her ability to plumb the mind and who even rivals Proust in her ability to describe the deepest sensations (and who does so with the possession of only three of the five senses): Helen Keller.

Keller and her writing have only come into eclipse in the past few decades; in her time, however, Winston Churchill called her “the greatest woman of our age,” and in a perhaps even more accurate assessment, Keller’s friend Mark Twain said that she was “fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare, and the rest of the immortals. . . . She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is today.” In a 2003 essay for The New Yorker, “What Helen Keller Saw” (collected in her 2006 book The Din in the Head), Cynthia Ozick writes that Keller’s current relative obscurity stems from criticism of how “literary” her writing is—“literary” in terms of being influenced by books as ostensibly opposed to being influenced by first-hand experience. Ozick successfully defends Keller’s high literary quality by arguing that almost all writers learn to write best by reading and that all writers go into great detail about things that they’ve never seen or experienced with their own immediate senses.

After all, is it in any way probable that Dante really saw anything that he wrote about in his Comedy (a poem whose working title was Vision) or that he learned to write (and imagine) so well without reading deeply in Virgil, Ovid, or Apuleius—or in Biblical literature, whose utterly outlandish and fantastical elements created much of the template for the medieval Florentine’s “high fantasy?” And could he have designed such an elaborately tactile world and universe (and especially one that doesn’t correspond very closely to reality) without studying how people described them in all the known scientific and theological texts?

What many critics seem to ignore is that Keller probably had more tactile experience with the world than not just the majority of the world’s greatest writers, but than most of the rest of humanity. She loved the outdoors, and she strove to experience it (and to describe it) in ways rarely seen in even the finest naturalists. With the near-constant companionship and assistance of Anne Sullivan, her extraordinary teacher and friend, she rode tandem bikes and horses, rowed boats, explored the woods, climbed trees, went swimming, examined insects, played with animals, and grew to understand the relationships between the earth and sky and trees and rivers and human beings in ways that perhaps few people with sight or hearing have ever known.

Through her constant explorations, she developed a profoundly intimate understanding of how the world works, is arranged, and even “looks.” She may not have literally been able to see or hear Niagara Falls, but her descriptions of climbing the stairs down into its tumult and of crossing the bridge that connects the American side to the Canadian side—and especially of her simply astonishing experience of putting her hands to her hotel room’s window and feeling the overwhelming power of the Falls’ vibrations—allow us to see and hear this natural wonder ourselves and become convinced that she experienced them as movingly as did any of her companions.

As with her hotel window, she also had literal hands-on experience with much of the culture that we’d think of as closed to her. When she visited museums she was almost always given special permission to examine the sculptures with her hands, and this was one of her greatest pleasures. Her understanding of form and style were suffused with both a sophistication and an unjaded awe that would have made her a first-rate art critic. She couldn’t see paintings, of course, but she delighted in having them described to her in detail, and she took great interest in new exhibitions and in how people received and reacted to them.

She was also fascinated with music, and whenever she went to a church the organist would usually give her a private recital and allow her to feel the vibrations encompass her body. As anyone who’s felt a great church organ shake their bones knows, this is literally a moving experience. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that she took singing lessons (to help strengthen her speaking voice, although she of course became fascinated with the sounds that she was capable of making) and that she even went so far as to take piano lessons (an experiment that didn’t go very far but that she greatly enjoyed).