THREE DAYS TO SEE
- Helen Adams Keller
Helen Adams Keller was born with the ability to see and hear. But at the age of 19 months, she contracted an illness and loses sense of sight and hearing. She always longs to have the sense she can enjoy and feel things, nature, and people around her. In her essay Three Days to See she writes that if she is gifted with the sense of seeing and hearing for three day how would have she enjoyed.
She says that how enthusiastically we live each minutes and day as if we need to die tomorrow. Such an attitude would emphasize the values of life. We should live each day with gentleness, vigor, and a keenness of appreciation which is often lost when time stretches before us in the constant panorama of more days and months and years to come. It is always neglected that we have to die one day and death is inevitable but we feel it is in a far distance. The attitude of negligence continues and the importance of the sensual organs is not at all felt. Its importance is known to those people who lost or do not have all the faculties.
We see around us, but all the time it goes unnoticed the beauty of nature, and rarely we use it in the fullest way. Helen Keller longs to see and hear. She says that if, by some miracle I was granted three seeing days, after a long relapse into darkness. She illustrates that she would divide all three days into three parts. On the first day, she wants to see the people whose kindness and gentleness and companionship have made my life worth living. Firstly, she wants to look at her teacher Mrs. Anne Sullivan Macy, who made her exposed to the outer sphere of the world. Helen Keler longs to feel her sympathetic tenderness and patience with which she could accomplish the difficult task of education; additionally, the strength of character that made her to be firm to face the difficulties and compassion for all humanities has touched my heart so deeply.
She further writes that on the first day she would be busy calling up all her dear friends and look long into their faces imprinting upon her mind the outward evidences of the beauty that is within them. And she wishes to see the warm colors in the rugs, the pictures on the walls, the intimate trifles that transform a house into home. In the afternoon, she wants to take a long walk in the woods and intoxicate her eyes on the beauties of the world of Nature, and on her way she yearns to observe the patient horses ploughing in the field and the serene content of men living close to the soil. She composes to serene glory of a colorful sunset. She appreciates the invention of the artificial light which gave sight to the world after the dusk.
The second day she longs to see the man’s progress and inventions, the kaleidoscope of the ages. And wishes to see the New York Museum of Natural History to tough with her hands many of the objects that were exhibited. She longs to see the condensed history of the earth and its inhabitants displayed their animals and the races of men pictured in their native environments: gigantic carcasses of dinosaurs and mastodons which roamed the earth long before man appeared. And her next sight would be the metropolitan museum of Art, and Museum of Natural History reveals the material aspects of the world, and Metropolitan show the myriad facets of the human spirit.
In the second day of sight, she says that the things she knew though touch but she want to see now. The magnificent would of painting, from the Italian Primitives with their serene religious devotion to the moderns, with their feverish vision. She wants to see deep into the canvases of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian and Rembrandt and she wishes to feast her eyes upon the warm colors of Veronese, study of the mysteries of El Greco, and catch a new vision of nature from Corot. She sights that there is so much rich meaning and beauty in the art of the ages for all of us who have eyes to see, feel and enjoy!
In the evening, she longs to spend her time at a theatre or at the movies. The fascinating figure of Hamlet, or the gusty Falstaff amid colorful Elizabethan trappings!
In the third last day of sight, she wants to start from her home in the quiet little suburb of Forest Hills, Long Island, surrounded by green lawns, trees, and flowers are neat little houses, happy with the voices and movements of wives and children. She wants to go ahead the rise of fantastic towers of New York, a city that seems to have stepped from the pages of a fairy story. And she wants to go around of the city. First, she would like to stand at a busy corner, merely looking at people, trying by sight of them to understand something of their lives. She quotes beautifully that “I see smiles, I am happy. I see serious determination and I am proud. I see suffering, and I am compassionate.” These are the compassionate words she draws from her observations and she feels and experiences the pain of others and she appreciates the determined people and show her compassionate nature towards the suffering.
Finally, she wants to make a tour of the city – to Park Avenue, to the slums, to factories, to parks where children play. Her third day would end after watching the hilariously funny play.
She finally writes that although she could not see all the beauties but the memories remains fresh in her mind.
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