
[Click the image to enlarge]--Helen Keller--
From the moment early humans created words, the seed of the library was there, in the beginning, with the word.
The Miracle Worker, the classic play [and film] of Helen Keller's life, depicts this seed at the moment of sprouting. The six-year-old Helen, deaf, blind and locked for years in a silence of darkness and almost wild with frustration, stands at the pump, her hand under the running water. Her teacher Annie Sullivan is spelling "water" in sign letters repeatedly into Helen's little palm - - probably for the hundredth time.
Then there is that stark moment of epiphany when the child, for years bereft of any way to communicate, makes the sudden connection between the cold water and the fingers insistently making shapes in her palm. In that moment, a human child skips over eons of human history, leaping from the inchoate and languageless state of man's prehistory into the world of signs.
Later, Helen Keller wrote that she wasn't fully conscious until she had language:
"It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was seven years old. The morning after my teacher came she gave me a doll. ... As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. .."
Source : here


