The Story of My Life: With her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert MacyKeller, Helen
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The Story of My Life: With her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert Macy
Keller, Helen
Deafblind women -- United States -- Biography; Keller, Helen, 1880-1968
It is true, on the other hand, that in her descriptions, she is
best from the point of view of art when she is faithful to her own
sensations; and this is precisely true of all artists.
Her recent training has taught her to drop a good deal of her
conventionality and to write about experiences in her life which are
peculiar to her and which, like the storm in the wild cherry tree, mean
most and call for the truest phrasing. She has learned more and more to
give up the style she borrowed from books and tried to use, because she
wanted to write like other people; she has learned that she is at her
best when she "feels" the lilies sway; lets the roses press into her
hands and speaks of the heat which to her means light.
Miss Keller's autobiography contains almost everything that she ever
intended to publish. It seems worth while, however, to quote from some
of her chance bits of writing, which are neither so informal as her
letters nor so carefully composed as her story of her life. These
extracts are from her exercises in her course in composition, where she
showed herself at the beginning of her college life quite without rival
among her classmates. Mr. Charles T. Copeland, who has been for many
years instructor in English and Lecturer on English Literature at
Harvard and Radcliffe, said to me: "In some of her work she has shown
that she can write better than any pupil I ever had, man or woman. She
has an excellent 'ear' for the flow of sentences." The extracts follow:
A few verses of Omar Khayyam's poetry have just been read to me, and I
feel as if I had spent the last half-hour in a magnificent sepulcher.
Yes, it is a tomb in which hope, joy and the power of acting nobly
lie buried. Every beautiful description, every deep thought glides
insensibly into the same mournful chant of the brevity of life, of the
slow decay and dissolution of all earthly things. The poet's bright,
fond memories of love, youth and beauty are but the funeral torches
shedding their light on this tomb, or to modify the image a little,
they are the flowers that bloom on it, watered with tears and fed by a
bleeding heart. Beside the tomb sits a weary soul, rejoicing neither in
the joys of the past nor in the possibilities of the future, but seeking
consolation in forgetfulness. In vain the inspiring sea shouts to this
languid soul, in vain the heavens strive with its weakness; it still
persists in regretting and seeks a refuge in oblivion from the pangs
of present woe. At times it catches some faint echo from the living,
joyous, real world, a gleam of the perfection that is to be; and,
thrilled out of its despondency, feels capable of working out a grand
ideal even "in the poor, miserable, hampered actual," wherein it is
placed; but in a moment the inspiration, the vision is gone, and
this great, much-suffering soul is again enveloped in the darkness of
uncertainty and despair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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