The Story of My Life

“The beginning of my life was simple and much like every other little life. I came, I saw, I conquered, as the first baby in the family always does” 

Keller recalls her very early days as normal times for any average child. As the first born in her family, the essence of her character is tempered in her desire to be, see, and do. Her loss of sight and hearing shortly afterwards makes this quote all the more bittersweet.

“But, except for these fleeting memories, if, indeed, they be memories, it all seems very unreal, like a nightmare” 

The permanent price that her illness costs is remembered by Keller as akin to an unreal night terror. Here we see the natural denial that occurs in the mind of a young child whose life has been forever changed by what has happened to her, in ways she cannot possibly yet comprehend.

“But during the first nineteen months of my life I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out” 

For Keller, the difficulty was not just being blind and deaf, but remembering what it was like to be able to see, even for a short while as a baby. The tantalizing, brief remembrances of what she used to have haunt her early on in the period after her illness.