The Story of My Life

The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

374 Pages

Started: 9 February 2010
Finished: 14 April 2010

What an absolutely amazing book! It is amazing to be filled with a sense of your own underachievement and hope at the exact same time. I felt inspired.

This book is Miss Keller’s autobiography as she wrote it while in college. What follows is a collection of her letters as well as a description of her and her eduction with letters written by Anne Sullivan.

Here are a few of my favorite passages, that made me laugh, smile, and think.

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.
pg. 85

At last the dreaded hour arrives, and you are a favoured being indeed if you feel prepared, and are able at the right time to all to your standard thoughts that will aid you in that supreme effort. It happens too often that your trumpet call is unheeded. It is most perplexing and exasperating that just at the moment when you need your memory and a nice sense of discrimination, these faculties take to themselves wings and fly away. The facts you have garnered with such infinite trouble invariably fail you at a pinch.
“Give a brief account of Huss and his work.” Huss? Who was he and what did he do? The name looks strangely familiar. You ransack your budget of historic facts much as you would hunt for a bit of silk in a rag-bag. You are sure it is somewhere in your mind near the top — you saw it there the other day when you were looking up the beginnings of the Reformation. But where is it now? You fish out all manner of odds and ends of knowledge — revolutions, schisms, massacres, systems of government; but Huss — where is he? You are amazed at all the things you know which are not on the examination paper. In desperation you seize the budget and dump everything out, and there in a corner is your man, serenely brooding on his own private thought, unconscious of the catastrophe which he has brought upon you.
Just then the proctor informs you that time is up. With a feeling of intense disgust you kick the mass of rubbish into a corner and go home, your head full of revolutionary schemes to abolish the divine right of professors to ask questions without the consent of the questioned.
pg. 89-90

I read them in the intervals between study and play with an ever-deepening sense of pleasure. I did not study nor analyze them — I did not know whether they were well written or not; I never thought about style or authorship. They laid their treasures at my feet, and I accepted them as we accept the sunshine and the love of our friends.
pg. 93

How easy it is to fly on paper wings!
pg. 95 (speaking of reading)

It is told of [Helen Keller] that, as a child of eight, when some one tried to interfere with her that she sat sober a few moments, and, when asked what was the trouble, answered, “I am preparing to assert my independence.”
pg 323-324

And I most enjoyed reading this book because my particular copy used to belong to my Grandma. And she had marked some passages and stapled news clippings about Helen Keller into the back pages. I love how books can connect people across time and space like that.

Rating: 10

Alphabet of Books – K