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THREE DAYS TO SEE (page 3)
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II
Perhaps I can best illustrate by imagining what I should most like to see if I
were given the use of my eyes, say, for just three days. And while I am
imagining, suppose you, too, set your mind to work on the problem of how you
would use your own eyes if you had only three more days to see. If with the
oncoming darkness of the third night you knew that the sun would never rise for
you again, how would you spend those three precious intervening days? What
would you most want to let your gaze rest upon?
I, naturally, should want most to see the things which have become dear to me
through my years of darkness. You, too, would want to let your eyes rest long
on the things that have become dear to you so that you could take the memory of
them with you into the night that loomed before you.
If, by some miracle, I were granted three seeing days, to be followed by a
relapse into darkness, I should divide the period into three parts.
On the first day, I should want to see the people whose kindness and gentleness
and companionship have made my life worth living. First I should like to gaze
long upon the face of my dear teacher, Mrs. Anne Sullivan Macy, who came to me
when I was a child and opened the outer world to me. I should want not merely
to see the outline of her face, so that I could cherish it in my memory, but to
study that face and find in it the living evidence of the sympathetic
tenderness and patience with which she accomplished the difficult task of my
education. I should like to see in her eyes that strength of character which
has enabled her to stand firm in the face of difficulties, and that compassion
for all humanity which she has revealed to me so often.
I do not know what it is to see into the heart of a friend through that "window
of the soul," the eye. I can only "see" through my finger tips the outline of a
face. I can detect laughter, sorrow, and many other obvious emotions. I know my
friends from the feel of their faces. But I cannot really picture their
personalities by touch. I know their personalities, of course, through other
means, through the thoughts they express to me, through whatever of their
actions are revealed to me. But I am denied that deeper understanding of them
which I am sure would come through sight of them, through watching their
reactions to various expressed thoughts and circumstances, through noting the
immediate and fleeting reactions of their eyes and countenance.
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