Seeing Without Eyes.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 1, 6 January 1909, Page 48

Seeing Without Eyes.

FINGERS THAT HEAR. A wonderful book has just been completed. It is worthy of kng study for the beauty of its matter alone; but its chief wonder is manifest when the reader knows that its author is Miss Helen Keller, blind and deaf, and that she has conquered her affliction and has learnt to know the world with two senses—touch and smell—better than many of us who have five, says the "London Daily Express.” She calls her book “The World I Live In,” and her world seems to be a more glorious and peaceful world than the one which we see, speak, and listen tn every day. There is nothing unbeautiful or base in the world of the blind deafmute. As you read the marvellous knowledge of the world’s smallest and largest things which Miss Keller shows, you wonder how it has been possible for any one so handicapped to fathom all the secrets that are hidden from her eyes and ears. She was born without sight, hearing, or the power tn speak. For years she was simply an animate body barely able to understand who or what she was. She tells you that she has learnt everything by touch and smell. She can s?p and hoar with her sense nf touch. "The dolicate tremble of a butterfly’s wing in my band,” she writes, "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 shype in my mind constitute my world. ••With my hands 1 can feel the comic as well as the beautiful in the outward appearance of things. Remember that you. dependent on your sight, <lo not realise how many things are tangible. The velvet of the rose is not that of a ripe peach or a baby's dimpled cheek. The hardness of a rock is to the hardness of wood what a man's deep bass voice is to a woman* voice when it is low.” Miss Keller has never seen the AA’inged A’ictory. yet- what an admirable description she gives of it: — "When I touch what there is of the AA’inged A’ictory it reminds me at first of a headless, limbless dream that flics towards me in an unrestful sleep. Ihe garments of the A’ictory thrust stifllv out behind, and do not resemble garments that I have felt, fluttering, flying, folding, spreading in the wind. But imagination fulfils these imperfections, and straightway the A’ictory becomes a powerful and spirited figure, with the sweep of ?ea winds in her robes and the splendour of conquest in her wings.*’ She is able to tell the characters of people from the hands she touches. "Sometimes*’ she savs. "I recognise with foreboding the kindly but stupid hand of one who tells me with many words news that is no nows. 1 have met a bishop with a jocose hand, a humorist with a hand of leaden gravity, a man of pretentious valour with a timorous hand; and a quiet apologetic man with a fist of iron.” Another wav by which Miss Keller learns the world is by "vibration." She feels footsteps, and knows a child's patter. the young man's firm, free step, the "heavy, sedate tread of the middle aged/’ and the "creak of new shoes.*’ She has "felt” sounds with her hands. "The utterances of animals, though wordless, are eloquent to me.” she says, she knows by vibration and touch a dog's "bow-wow*’ of warning or joyous welcome. the cat's purr, its angry, jerky, scalding spit. "Every atom of my body.” she writes, "is a vibroacope/* And then she relates a little every-day incident whi<-h forces the reader to realise that this wonderful writer who "sees” everything is yet in darkness: "I reach out, and my fingers touch something furry, which jumps about, gathers itself together as if to spring, and acts like an animal, . . I touch it again, more firmly, and find it is a fur coat flapping in the wind.”