The Power of Touch

Helen Keller (1880–1968)
From Helen Keller: Autobiographies & Other Writings

Interesting Links

Interview: “Commitment, Capacity, Compassion: Kim E. Nielsen on American Icon Helen Keller” (Library of America)

“Helen Keller and Me—Why it was ‘her doomed love life that really made me identify’” (Kathi Wolfe, American Masters, PBS)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “My Future As I See It,” Helen Keller
• “Nature Near Home,” John Burroughs
• “Women in Politics,” Fannie Barrier Williams

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Helen Keller: Autobiographies & Other Writings
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Helen Keller holding the reins of a horse on the lawn in front of her home in Wrentham, Massachusetts, with a man (most likely John Hitz, Jr.) sitting on the porch in the background, c. 1907. Photographer unknown. Hitz was the first superintendent of the Volta Bureau, an institution for research on deafness he had co-founded in 1887 with Alexander Graham Bell. Hitz first met Keller in 1892 and visited her almost every summer; he died at the age of 80 in 1908. (Library of Congress)

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“It has been objected that I may not speak of singing birds, since I cannot hear them, nor of the green ecstasy of young grass, since I cannot see its hue,” Keller wrote in a preface to 1933 edition of The World I Live In. “But I claim it is the Essence of beauty I feel, and not the details that go to its making.”

Published in 1908, The World I Live In was Keller’s follow-up to the success of her first book, The Story of My Life, which appeared while she was still attending Radcliffe College. She finished her last year (her senior thesis was “The Puritan and Cavalier Elements in Milton’s Minor Poems”) and graduated cum laude in June 1904. Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, encouraged her to write essays for his readers. He suggested topics he thought might appeal to the magazine’s national audience and hoped “that a little book may grow out of it.” Her first piece, “A Chat About the Hand,” appeared in the January 1905 issue, followed by three additional essays across four issues in 1908: the two-part “Sense and Sensibility,” “A Chant of Darkness,” and “My Dreams.” She then revised the magazine versions, most notably by dividing them into shorter chapters, and published The World I Live In at the end of the year.

Keller was already weary of writing only about herself. “The editors are so kind that they are no doubt right in thinking that nothing I have to say about the affairs of the universe would be interesting,” she wrote in the preface to the original edition. “But until they give me opportunity to write about matters that are not-me, the world must go on uninstructed and unreformed, and I can only do my best with the one small subject upon which I am allowed to discourse.” She would eventually break through the ceiling of the limitations imposed on her by others and become an activist for women’s rights, workers’ rights, racial equality (including her opposition to apartheid after visiting South Africa in 1951), and pacifism.

Twenty-five years later, as she would point out in her preface to the 1933 edition, she was still discomfited by the various attempts to redefine her life by discounting her descriptions of her own experiences:

It happens that the triple handicap of blindness, deafness and imperfect speech has made me an object of unusual speculation. To those in possession of their full quota of faculties I seem one apart from all categories—one who acquires knowledge differently and communicates strangely. I am as one who cometh from afar and excites the wonder of the native-born. I have read countless articles about myself by all kinds of writers, and usually I find myself spoken of as outside the circle of human beings. I am denied “first experiences.” I “know things vicariously,” my concepts “are confused,” and “left to my own resources, my world would be grotesque and meagre.” I learn that “in communicating with me my companions sort out words and convert them into human intercourse”!

With what appears a natural perversity people misunderstand and exaggerate the simplest facts about me. When I try to tell them how I gained knowledge of the world and became a part of it, I feel as if they, not I, were deaf and blind!

In “The Power of Touch,” one of the entries from The World I Live In, Keller refutes the idea that “blindness and deafness sever us completely from the things which the seeing and the hearing enjoy” and explains how the enhanced sense of touch reveals sensations and experiences that “our more fortunate fellows miss, because their sense of touch is uncultivated.”

Note: The Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind commenced publication in March 1907; the text Keller quotes appeared in several newspaper articles in the first few months of that year, and it was sometimes attributed to the magazine’s editor, Walter G. Holmes.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs

The Power of Touch

Some months ago, in a newspaper which announced the publication of the “Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind,” appeared the following paragraph:

“Many poems and stories must be omitted because they deal with sight. Allusion to moonbeams, rainbows, starlight, clouds, and beautiful scenery may not be printed, because they serve to emphasize the blind man’s sense of his affliction.”

That is to say, I may not talk about beautiful mansions and gardens because I am poor. I may not read about Paris and the West Indies because I cannot visit them in their territorial reality. I may not dream of heaven because it is possible that I may never go there. Yet a venturesome spirit impels me to use words of sight and sound whose meaning I can guess only from analogy and fancy. This hazardous game is half the delight, the frolic, of daily life. I glow as I read of splendors which the eye alone can survey. Allusions to moonbeams and clouds do not emphasize the sense of my affliction: they carry my soul beyond affliction’s narrow actuality.

Critics delight to tell us what we cannot do. They assume that blindness and deafness sever us completely from the things which the seeing and the hearing enjoy, and hence they assert we have no moral right to talk about beauty, the skies, mountains, the song of birds, and colors. They declare that the very sensations we have from the sense of touch are “vicarious,” as though our friends felt the sun for us! They deny a priori what they have not seen and I have felt. Some brave doubters have gone so far even as to deny my existence. In order, therefore, that I may know that I exist, I resort to Descartes’s method: “I think, therefore I am.” Thus I am metaphysically established, and I throw upon the doubters the burden of proving my nonexistence. When we consider how little has been found out about the mind, is it not amazing that any one should presume to define what one can know or cannot know? I admit that there are innumerable marvels in the visible universe unguessed by me. Likewise, O confident critic, there are a myriad sensations perceived by me of which you do not dream.

Necessity gives to the eye a precious power of seeing, and in the same way it gives a precious power of feeling to the whole body. Sometimes it seems as if the very substance of my flesh were so many eyes looking out at will upon a world new created every day. The silence and darkness which are said to shut me in, open my door most hospitably to countless sensations that distract, inform, admonish, and amuse. With my three trusty guides, touch, smell, and taste, I make many excursions into the borderland of experience which is in sight of the city of Light. Nature accommodates itself to every man’s necessity. If the eye is maimed, so that it does not see the beauteous face of day, the touch becomes more poignant and discriminating. Nature proceeds through practice to strengthen and augment the remaining senses. For this reason the blind often hear with greater ease and distinctness than other people. The sense of smell becomes almost a new faculty to penetrate the tangle and vagueness of things. Thus, according to an immutable law, the senses assist and reinforce one another.

It is not for me to say whether we see best with the hand or the eye. I only know that the world I see with my fingers is alive, ruddy, and satisfying. Touch brings the blind many sweet certainties which our more fortunate fellows miss, because their sense of touch is uncultivated. When they look at things, they put their hands in their pockets. No doubt that is one reason why their knowledge is often so vague, inaccurate, and useless. It is probable, too, that our knowledge of phenomena beyond the reach of the hand is equally imperfect. But, at all events, we behold them through a golden mist of fantasy.

There is nothing, however, misty or uncertain about what we can touch. Through the sense of touch I know the faces of friends, the illimitable variety of straight and curved lines, all surfaces, the exuberance of the soil, the delicate shapes of flowers, the noble forms of trees, and the range of mighty winds. Besides objects, surfaces, and atmospherical changes, I perceive countless vibrations. I derive much knowledge of every-day matter from the jars and jolts which are to be felt everywhere in the house.

Footsteps, I discover, vary tactually according to the age, the sex, and the manners of the walker. It is impossible to mistake a child’s patter for the tread of a grown person. The step of the young man, strong and free, differs from the heavy, sedate tread of the middle-aged, and from the step of the old man, whose feet drag along the floor, or beat it with slow, faltering accents. On a bare floor a girl walks with a rapid, elastic rhythm which is quite distinct from the graver step of the elderly woman. I have laughed over the creak of new shoes and the clatter of a stout maid performing a jig in the kitchen. One day, in the dining-room of a hotel, a tactual dissonance arrested my attention. I sat still and listened with my feet. I found that two waiters were walking back and forth, but not with the same gait. A band was playing, and I could feel the music-waves along the floor. One of the waiters walked in time to the band, graceful and light, while the other disregarded the music and rushed from table to table to the beat of some discord in his own mind. Their steps reminded me of a spirited war-steed harnessed with a cart-horse.

Often footsteps reveal in some measure the character and the mood of the walker. I feel in them firmness and indecision, hurry and deliberation, activity and laziness, fatigue, carelessness, timidity, anger, and sorrow. I am most conscious of these moods and traits in persons with whom I am familiar.

Footsteps are frequently interrupted by certain jars and jerks, so that I know when one kneels, kicks, shakes something, sits down, or gets up. Thus I follow to some extent the actions of people about me and the changes of their postures. Just now a thick, soft patter of bare, padded feet and a slight jolt told me that my dog had jumped on the chair to look out of the window. I do not, however, allow him to go uninvestigated; for occasionally I feel the same motion, and find him, not on the chair, but trespassing on the sofa.

When a carpenter works in the house or in the barn near by, I know by the slanting, up-and-down, toothed vibration, and the ringing concussion of blow upon blow, that he is sawing or hammering. If I am near enough, a certain vibration, traveling back and forth along a wooden surface, brings me the information that he is using a plane.

A slight flutter on the rug tells me that a breeze has blown my papers off the table. A round thump is a signal that a pencil has rolled on the floor. If a book falls, it gives a flat thud. A wooden rap on the balustrade announces that dinner is ready. Many of these vibrations are obliterated out of doors. On a lawn or the road, I can feel only running, stamping, and the rumble of wheels.

By placing my hand on a person’s lips and throat, I gain an idea of many specific vibrations, and interpret them: a boy’s chuckle, a man’s “Whew!” of surprise, the “Hem!” of annoyance or perplexity, the moan of pain, a scream, a whisper, a rasp, a sob, a choke, and a gasp. The utterances of animals, though wordless, are eloquent to me—the cat’s purr, its mew, its angry, jerky, scolding spit; the dog’s bow-wow of warning or of joyous welcome, its yelp of despair, and its contented snore; the cow’s moo; a monkey’s chatter; the snort of a horse; the lion’s roar, and the terrible snarl of the tiger. Perhaps I ought to add, for the benefit of the critics and doubters who may peruse this essay, that with my own hand I have felt all these sounds. From my childhood to the present day I have availed myself of every opportunity to visit zoölogical gardens, menageries, and the circus, and all the animals, except the tiger, have talked into my hand. I have touched the tiger only in a museum, where he is as harmless as a lamb. I have, however, heard him talk by putting my hand on the bars of his cage. I have touched several lions in the flesh, and felt them roar royally, like a cataract over rocks.

To continue, I know the plop of liquid in a pitcher. So if I spill my milk, I have not the excuse of ignorance. I am also familiar with the pop of a cork, the sputter of a flame, the tick-tack of the clock, the metallic swing of the windmill, the labored rise and fall of the pump, the voluminous spurt of the hose, the deceptive tap of the breeze at door and window, and many other vibrations past computing.

There are tactual vibrations which do not belong to skin-touch. They penetrate the skin, the nerves, the bones, like pain, heat, and cold. The beat of a drum smites me through from the chest to the shoulder-blades. The din of the train, the bridge, and grinding machinery retains its “old-man-of-the-sea” grip upon me long after its cause has been left behind. If vibration and motion combine in my touch for any length of time, the earth seems to run away while I stand still. When I step off the train, the platform whirls round, and I find it difficult to walk steadily.

Every atom of my body is a vibroscope. But my sensations are not infallible. I reach out, and my fingers meet something furry, which jumps about, gathers itself together as if to spring, and acts like an animal. I pause a moment for caution. I touch it again more firmly, and find it is a fur coat fluttering and flapping in the wind. To me, as to you, the earth seems motionless, and the sun appears to move; for the rays of the afternoon withdraw more and more, as they touch my face, until the air becomes cool. From this I understand how it is that the shore seems to recede as you sail away from it. Hence I feel no incredulity when you say that parallel lines appear to converge, and the earth and sky to meet. My few senses long ago revealed to me their imperfections and deceptivity.

Not only are the senses deceptive, but numerous usages in our language indicate that people who have five senses find it difficult to keep their functions distinct. I understand that we hear views, see tones, taste music. I am told that voices have color. Tact, which I had supposed to be a matter of nice perception, turns out to be a matter of taste. Judging from the large use of the word, taste appears to be the most important of all the senses. Taste governs the great and small conventions of life. Certainly the language of the senses is full of contradictions, and my fellows who have five doors to their house are not more surely at home in themselves than I. May I not, then, be excused if this account of my sensations lacks precision?

First published as part of “Sense and Sensibility” in the February 1908 issue of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine and revised for The World I Lived In (1908).