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
But I soon discovered that college was not quite the romantic lyceum
I had imagined. Many of the dreams that had delighted my young
inexperience became beautifully less and "faded into the light of common
day." Gradually I began to find that there were disadvantages in going
to college.
The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to have time
to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening
and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in
leisure moments when the words of some loved poet touch a deep, sweet
chord in the soul that until then had been silent. But in college there
is no time to commune with one's thoughts. One goes to college to learn,
it seems, not to think. When one enters the portals of learning, one
leaves the dearest pleasures--solitude, books and imagination--outside
with the whispering pines. I suppose I ought to find some comfort in
the thought that I am laying up treasures for future enjoyment, but I
am improvident enough to prefer present joy to hoarding riches against a
rainy day.
My studies the first year were French, German, history, English
composition and English literature. In the French course I read some
of the works of Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Alfred de Musset and
Sainte-Beuve, and in the German those of Goethe and Schiller. I reviewed
rapidly the whole period of history from the fall of the Roman Empire
to the eighteenth century, and in English literature studied critically
Milton's poems and "Areopagitica."
I am frequently asked how I overcome the peculiar conditions under which
I work in college. In the classroom I am of course practically alone.
The professor is as remote as if he were speaking through a telephone.
The lectures are spelled into my hand as rapidly as possible, and much
of the individuality of the lecturer is lost to me in the effort to keep
in the race. The words rush through my hand like hounds in pursuit of a
hare which they often miss. But in this respect I do not think I am much
worse off than the girls who take notes. If the mind is occupied
with the mechanical process of hearing and putting words on paper at
pell-mell speed, I should not think one could pay much attention to the
subject under consideration or the manner in which it is presented.
I cannot make notes during the lectures, because my hands are busy
listening. Usually I jot down what I can remember of them when I get
home. I write the exercises, daily themes, criticisms and hour-tests,
the mid-year and final examinations, on my typewriter, so that the
professors have no difficulty in finding out how little I know. When
I began the study of Latin prosody, I devised and explained to my
professor a system of signs indicating the different meters and
quantities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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