When believing isn't seeing...
November 14, 2004
10:32 p.m., MT
While browsing through old books this weekend, I found the following quote by Hellen Keller, and thought it lovely enough to share...

"I understand how scarlet can differ from crimson because I know the smell of an orange is not the smell of a grapefruit. I can also conceive that colors have shades and guess what the shades are. In smell and taste there are varieties not broad enough to be fundamental; so I call them shades... The force of association drives me to say that white is exalted and pure, green is exuberant, red suggests love or shame or strength. Without the color or its equivalent, life to me would be dark, barren, a vast blackness.
Thus through an inner law of completeness my thoughts are not permitted to remain colorless. It strains my mind to separate color and sound from objects. Since my education began I have always had things described to me with their colors and sounds, by one with keen senses and a fine feeling for the significant. Therefore, I habitually think of things as colored and resonant. Habit accounts for part. The soul sense accounts for another part. The brain with its five-sensed construction accounts for the rest. Inclusive of all, the unity of the world demands that color be kept in whether I have cognizance of it or not. Rather than be shut out, I take part in it by discussing it, happy in the happiness of those near to me who gaze at the lovely hues of the sunset or the rainbow." - Helen Keller

From The Rainbow Book, edited by F. Lanier Graham, Revised Ed., Vintage Books, 1979

Cat

Replies: 1 brave individual has opined

On Monday, November 15th, DLT said:

HK is one of those people I wish I had been able to meet, like Sam Clemens, Mary Wollstoncraft, Leonardo DaVinci, and, if there was a historical Jesus, him too.

Perhaps this is why I (and Sunni too) have so much interest in sorting the diamonds from among the miriad grains of human sand we encounter. Wouldn't it be a shame to hear, in our late years, that we were contemporaries with some great mind no longer with us, and never met?

El Lobo Loco