Letter to Carl Sandburg from Helen Keller (n.d.)
Transcription
Dear Carl Sandburg,
I hope you have been too occupied with important work to perceive the length of time that has passed without my acknowledging your two delightful letters. The courage I have to write now is inspired by reference in your second note to a long vacation when you received no mail. That gives me hope that you may understand and forgive the belatedness of my response. My effort to keep up with my correspondence is as vain as the effort of Ixion! But after re-reading your letters, I am too eager to manifest my joy in them to indulge in apologies and lamentations. I feel again the glow of the moment when I heard from you, and wanted to tell you at once of my proud delight in getting from you two letters of the dearest kind.Now that I have started, I do not at all know how to thank you for writing to me. Your warm words about my appearance in Vaudeville were so unexpected that if I had not had a perfect confidence in your sincerity, I should have suspected that my limitations induced you to exaggerate your enthusiasm. But if you saw through my halting speech a free soul full of "the zest of living," then I have lived indeed.
I confess, I enjoyed being in Vaudeville most of the time. I felt the sympathy and interest of the audience, and I loved the playboy atmosphere of the stage. I thought, though, that much of my experience there was very ridiculous, and some of it was very awful.
But last winter I discovered that some angel had transcribed a number of your poems into Braille. How eagerly my hands lingered over the pages, only wishing there were more of them to caress and absorb! That is no metaphorl (sic) for I literally absorb the poets I love. I carry their thoughts about me, and with them I build the bright castles I dwell in.
You give me a great sense of freedom and vision and an amazing adaptability to life's perversities. And your scorn --- how it searches out hypocrisy vivid as lightning! I feel that you have looked into all darknesses and listened to all silences, and feared not. But I feel equally your joy in all loveliness. Your birds and little "people of the eaves" sometimes talk into my hands.
But I must not go on forever. If I do not have a care, you will be sorry I broke the spell of silence with a bombardment of little words.
Once more thanks! I dare hope that you find time to send me another letter before we return to the unutterable dark whence we came.
Cordially yours,
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