Beyond the Auditory Wall, Deafness as Absence and Presence

“ Thus seeking an outlet for those social instincts which charge through his being, the deaf man finds himself among men, but as though surrounded by a great impenetrable wall against which their voices break in vain. ”

“ And then his deafness! When he was only thirty, the black fog of silence began to sink across his life; two years later he was stone-deaf, and nearly half his days were spent in the dungeon of isolation from real communion with man or with his own great music. He lived, indeed, as he said, inter lacrimas et luctum.
The blind are usually placid and trustful; it is the major affliction of the deaf that they grow suspicious of their intimates and abhorrent of themselves. There is nothing in history more majestic than the battle of this giant soul against his doom ”

“ The impossibility of saying anything but commonplace matters to a deaf man, of expressing any delicacy of thought in a raised tone, of giving utterance to fine feelings in a bawl. This man's deafness seemed to have made his mind and feelings uncommonly coarse ”

“ To give you some idea of my extraordinary deafness, I must tell you that in the theatre I am obliged to lean close up against the orchestra in order to understand the actors, and when a little way off I hear none of the high notes of instruments or singers. It is most astonishing that in conversation some people never seem to observe this; as I am subject to fits of absence, they attribute it to that cause. Often I can scarcely hear a person if he speaks low ”

“ The case of the deaf is unquestionably the worst of the two, when the deficiency is from birth. The subsequent loss of either sense is quite a different matter. Then, blindness is the severest privation of the two, from its compulsory idleness, and total exclusion from the objects of the lost sense, while the deaf can always be busy in mind and hands, and retain the most important part of the world of sound in written and printed speech. ”

“ It is quite clear that the loss of the powers of hearing and speech is a loss to the mind which no substitute can fully replace. Children who have learnt to speak and afterwards become deaf, lose the power of thinking in inward language, and become to all intents and purposes the same as those who could never hear at all, unless great pains are taken to keep up and increase their knowledge by other means. "And thus even those who become hard of hearing at an age when they can already speak a little, by little and little lose all that they have learnt. ”

“ The deaf-mute carries on processes of reasoning just like the hearing person. Speech is not necessary to reasoning, neither is language. To those who are familiar with the uneducated deaf child, it is well known that he is in no wise apparently different from his hearing brother. ”

“ This very ability to learn, in the child born deaf, is greater than in the normal child, in respect to pantomime and gesture. If a child with his hearing had to grow up among deaf-mutes, he would undoubtedly learn their language, and would in addition enjoy his own voice without being able to make use of it; but he would probably be discovered, further on, without testing his hearing, by the fact that he was not quite so complete a master of this gesture-language as the deaf-mutes, on account of the diversion of his attention by sound. ”

“ There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound. ”

“ Deaf persons, who have learned to know what [41] other persons are saying, merely by watching their lips, are able to "hear" much more than can the ordinary individual what goes on in moving pictures. ”

“ Whether they favor one or another of the methods of educating the deaf, they recognize the very great value of signs in social intercourse among the deaf, and its necessity in the pulpit and on the platform.
By means of the sign language the deaf child is enabled to comprehend subjects which his limited vocabulary would never enable him to do while dependent upon speech and reading alone. With the aid of an interpreter the deaf may enjoy lectures, sermons, plays, and all else while one of an audience, save, alone, music. ”

“ Since it has been shown that new perceptions and conditions have been developed in the absence of one or more of the superior senses, that the deaf are so keenly cognizant of vibration or jar, which is the father of sound; that the blind can feel the presence of objects at short distances, which is analogous to sight, it should not be thought strange that we make such frequent use of the word see, or that the deaf should make use of the word hear, and that these words are not without significance or import. ”

“ Deafness shuts him away from much social intercourse; but with the barring of one gateway to the soul, that of vision seems to have been opened wider. He has a genius for finding compositions, and discovers a picture in every scene. ”

“ Being deaf is merely to enjoy some of the advantages that the society to prevent unnecessary noises seeks to confer on a normal public. We admire a beautiful face and then add, 'But how she must hate to grow old; a tragedy of the mirror that we homely souls are spared.' All my life I envied persons with straight noses till I began to observe that with age the straight nose droops into a beak, whereas the youthful tip-tilt and concavity kind straightens its end to a fair classicism. Thus others than the Vicar of Wakefield draw upon content for the deficiencies of fortune. ”

“ To have been born deaf is different, and I have no doubt whatever that the deaf and dumb have delectable lands of their own into which we can never stray, where wonderful flowers of silence grow. It is even possible, since all the visible world is theirs, that they never envy us at all. ”

“ They do not form a large part of the population, and many people seldom come in contact with them. Their affliction to a great extent removes them from the usual avenues of intercourse with men and debars them from many of the social activities of life, all tending to make the deaf more or less a class apart in the community. They would seem, then, to have received separate treatment, as a section not wholly absorbed and lost in the general population, but in a measure standing out and differentiated from the rest of their kind. ”

“ Yet it remains that by and through all this the deaf have been the gainers as no other people in the world have ever been, and their story is as no other's in the rise of a section of mankind towards the richness and fullness of living which are the fruits of humanized society.
Great indeed can be the rejoicing of the deaf, for they are those to whom the way has been hard and long, but who have come from the darkness into the light. ”

“ More than fifteen million Americans of all ages experience some degree and form of hearing impairment. These hearing-impaired Americans continue to share in the life of the Nation, contribute to family life and the home, and provide civic support to their communities. They have steadfastly striven not only to Overcome their handicaps, but also to assist other members of our society. In so doing, the deaf and hearing impaired have made significant contributions to society, science, the arts and industry in virtually every field. ”

“ The deaf are not a burden upon the community.
2. They are wage-earners in a degree that compares well with the general population.
3. The occupations open to them and in which they are successfully employed are much larger in number than is generally thought, and in many their infirmity is very little of a drawback.
4. The deaf hold themselves on an economic equality with the rest of their fellow-citizens, and ask no alms or favors of any kind. ”

“ Many things are referred to as "wonders", as though it were strange that they could be done by people without hearing, some of the achievements of the deaf being set down as most remarkable. Such writings are usually in a kindly spirit, and may often serve a useful purpose in making known the similarity of the capabilities of the deaf and of the hearing; but when they make the deaf appear as a peculiar and unlike part of the race, their effect may be most misleading. The worst result is that the public becomes ready and willing to believe almost any thing about the deaf. ”

“ Thus deafness and blindness do not exist in the immaterial mind, which is philosophically the real world, but are banished with the perishable material senses. Reality, of which visible things are the symbol, shines before my mind. While I walk about my chamber with unsteady steps, my spirit sweeps skyward on eagle wings and looks out with unquenchable vision upon the world of eternal beauty. ”

“ This fact, which has now become a well-recognized part of aesthetic theory, distinguishes music from all the other arts. Music supplies us with no definite images of nature, as painting and sculpture do, and with no ideas, as poetry does. It contains feelings, but no meanings. Music offers us no background for emotion, no objects upon which it may be directed, no story, no mise en scene. It supplies us with the feeling tones of things and events, but not with the things or events themselves. It moves wholly in a world of its own, a world of pure feeling, with no embodiment save only sound. ”

“ At its highest degree of ennobling, music ought to become a form, and act on us with the calm power of an antique statue; in its most elevated perfection, the plastic art ought to become music and move us by the immediate action exercised on the mind by the senses; in its most complete development, poetry ought both to stir us powerfully like music and like plastic art to surround us with a peaceful light. ”

“ It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of form and matter. In its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire. ”

“ Sound exists in the form of vibration, but if I am deaf I cannot hear it: it has no existence—FOR ME. The problem thus centres itself largely in the mind of the individual rather than in the question whether there is or is not a message and a meaning. Not only music, but the whole world is brimming over with messages and meanings which our dull senses cannot appreciate. The folk who populate this globe are largely dead. They answer to such a limited range of interests and sensations that they cannot in any real sense be said to be "alive." ”

“ I see the blind man's eyes strain for the light, as he fearfully tries to walk his old rounds, [97] until the unchanging blank that everywhere spreads before him stamps the reality of the dark upon his consciousness.
My temporary loss of smell proved to me, too, that the absence of a sense need not dull the mental faculties and does not distort one's view of the world, and so I reason that blindness and deafness need not pervert the inner order of the intellect. ”

“ A blind man has no idea of those objects, which sight represents to us; a leper, whose skin has lost the sense of feeling, is denied all the ideas which arise from the touch; and a deaf [324] man has no knowledge of sounds. Let these three modes of sensation be successively destroyed, yet the mind will exist, its external functions will subsist, and thought will still manifest it within the man so deprived. But divest matter of all its qualities; strip it of colour, of solidity, and of every other property which has any relation to our senses, and the consequence will be its annihilation. ”

“ Those born blind and deaf can form no definite idea [Pg 246] of sensations they have never been able to perceive. It is well known that persons blind from their birth imagine colors by comparing them to sounds: for instance, they imagine red as the sound of a trumpet, blue as the sweet music of the violin. The deaf, when they read descriptions of delicious music, imagine the classic beauty of a painted picture. The temperaments of poets and artists are pre-eminently sensorial. And all the senses do not contribute in equal measure to give a type to the individual imagination ”

“ In fact, the parallel between sympathetic gradations of form and colour and harmony of musical tones is a very close one, and the appreciation of it is by no means rare. Any intelligent person, on seeing a suite of rooms designed and arranged by a real artist, though he may not understand why, will be impressed by the rhythm of space divisions, the harmony of colours, the lack of any jarring or discordant notes in the decoration, the simplicity, fitness, and real beauty, not of any particular part, perhaps, but of the whole combination. ”