Word: deafness
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...TIME selected our heroes, we found a pattern: the ones who changed society the most were those who liberated a segment of humanity that had been fenced in by prejudice. Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball; Helen Keller demolished old notions about the blind and deaf; and Harvey Milk dared to put himself on the ballot as an openly gay candidate. On his fourth...
Helen Keller was less than two years old when she came down with a fever. It struck dramatically and left her unconscious. The fever went just as suddenly. But she was blinded and, very soon after, deaf. As she grew up, she managed to learn to do tiny errands, but she also realized that she was missing something. "Sometimes," she later wrote, "I stood between two persons who were conversing and touched their lips. I could not understand, and was vexed. I moved my lips and gesticulated frantically without result. This made me so angry at times that I kicked...
...make any sense to me. Words were a weird concept. I remember being hit and slapped. And you act all that in. All rage is anger that is acted in, bottled in for so long that it just pops out. Helen had it harder. She was both blind and deaf. But, oh, the transformation that came over her when she discovered that words were related to things! It's like the lyrics of that song: "On a clear day, rise and look around...
...word see. I can speak the language of the sighted. That's part of the first great achievement of Helen Keller. She proved how language could liberate the blind and the deaf. She wrote, "Literature is my utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised." But how she struggled to master language. In her book Midstream, she wrote about how she was frustrated by the alphabet, by the language of the deaf, even with the speed with which her teacher spelled things out for her on her palm. She was impatient and hungry for words, and her teacher's scribbling...
...together with sturdy strumming, straightforward rhythm-bones and innocent voices on the cusp of corruption. She can hear little else than the tinkling and moaning of a hollow synthesizer that gets so lonely it would be frightening to anyone else. Her boyfriend calls to her, "Baby!" but she is deaf to his song. She is in a strange, sad world of impressions where the eyelids beat to a psychedelic beat. No one wants her to stop...