"How I Learned To See," an autobiographical excerpt from "The Story of My Life" by Helen Keller, is a unique and insightful perspective on how this incredible blind, deaf, and dumb woman achieved an understanding of such abstract concepts as love and thought. .
Through this narrative, Keller reveals the difficulty she had in trying to understand the more incorporeal aspects of the English language, such as love, thought, life and death. Keller writes mainly of her confusion over the word "love," as her lack of understanding is due mainly to her disabled senses. Keller questions her teacher, Miss Sullivan, asking her if love was the sweetness of flowers, or the warm glow of the sun. To each question Miss Sullivan replies negatively, puzzling Helen further.
A day or two afterward, Helen is stringing beads, and making many mistakes while doing so. Miss Sullivan tells Helen to think, tapping her head while signing for emphasis. It is at this moment that Helen has an incredible epiphany, as she remarks: "In a flash I knew that the word was the name of the process that was going on in my head. That was my first conscious perception of an abstract idea." Helen has discovered the true meaning of the word "think," and now she hungers for understanding of other enigmatic words, such as "love." It is this hunger, this precocious and insatiable curiosity, that allows Helen to grasp the meanings conceptual words. A light has been turned on in Helen's mind, and now she asks Miss Sullivan whether the warm rays of the sun are not love. Miss Sullivan responds simply, yet eloquently, as she says love is untouchable, yet we are cloaked in its embrace. Helen finally understands, and she feels "as if there were invisible lines stretched between my spirit and the spirits of others." Imagine her excitement, as Helen must have felt a deep, almost spiritual, kinship with other persons.
"How I Learned To See" shows how any person, no matter how physically disabled, is still at their very core a human being, fully capable of understanding and expressing their thoughts and feelings.