Deaf Child Quotes

Question What is a child? A quiet between two bombardments.

Becoming a man requires that the boys learn to be indifferent to the fate of women. Indifference requires that the boy learn experience women as objects. The poet, the mystic, the prophet, the so-called sensitive man of any stripe, will still hear the wind whisper and the trees cry. But to him, women will be mute. He will have learned to be deaf to the sounds, sighs, whispers, screams of women in order to ally himself with other men in the hope that they will not treat him as child, that is, as one who belongs with the women.

It was a love story about a father and a son. The rest was window dressing. As a love story between a parent and a child, it was universal. Didn't matter that I was gay, that he was deaf, that we didn't fit in, that we were each outcasts in our own way

This savoring of life is no small thing. The element of wonder is almost lost today with the onslaught of the media and gadgets of our noisy world. To let a child lose it is to make him blind and deaf to the best of life.

I receive remarkable letters. They are opened for me, unfolded, and spread out before my eyes in a daily ritual that gives the arrival of the mail the character of a hushed and holy ceremony. I carefully read each letter myself. Some of them are serious in tone, discussing the meaning of life, invoking the supremacy of the soul, the mystery of every existence. And by a curious reversal, the people who focus most closely on these fundamental questions tend to be people I had known only superficially. Their small talk has masked hidden depths. Had I been blind and deaf, or does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person's true nature? Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark... I hoard all these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship. It will keep the vultures at bay.

It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune. In our family, that was Tyler. He was waltzing while the rest of us hopped a jig; he was deaf to the raucous music of our lives, and we were deaf to the serene polyphony of his.

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable

The Father of Winter says tells Ista, "...For my great-souled child is very late, and lost upon his road. My calling voice cannot reach him. He cannot see the light in my window, for he is sundered from me, blind and deaf and stumbling, with none to take his hand and guide him. Yet you may touch him, in his darkness. And I may touch you, in yours. Then take you this thread to draw him through the maze, where I cannot go." Later, Ista delivers the message, "Your Father calls you to His Court. You need not pack; you go garbed in glory as you stand. He waits eagerly by His palace doors to welcome you, and has prepared a place at His high table by His side, in the company of the great-souled, honored, and best-beloved. In this I speak true. Bend your head.

On being conscious of being a writer: As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. [...] Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the “successful” writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat. Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness. The binge, the fling, the trip – all attempt to shake the film and get back under the dinning-room table, with a child’s beautifully clear eyes.

Imagine you are a pregnant young woman with tuberculosis. The father of your unborn child is a short-tempered alcoholic with syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease. You have already had five kids. One is blind, another died young, and a third is deaf and unable to speak. The fourth has tuberculosis—the same disease you have. What would you do in this situation? Should you consider abortion? If you chose to have the abortion, you would have ended a valuable human being—regardless of the possible difficulties it may have brought you. Fortunately, the young woman who was really in this dilemma chose life. Otherwise we would never have heard the Fifth Symphony by Beethoven, for this young woman was his mother.

The transept belfry and the two towers were to him three great cages, the birds in which, taught by him, would sing for him alone. Yet it was these same bells which had made him deaf; but mothers are often fondest of the child who has made them suffer most.

Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I think I must have invented him.’ I know all I want to about your child,’ Chauvin said harshly. Anne Desbaresdes moaned again, louder than before. Again she put her hand on the table. His eyes followed her movement and finally, painfully, he understood and lifted his own leaden hand and placed it on hers. Their hands were so cold they were touching only in intention, an illusion, in order for this to be fulfilled, for the sole reason that it should be fulfilled, none other, it was no longer possible. And yet, with their hands frozen in this funereal pose, Anne Desbaresdes stopped moaning. One last time,’ she begged, ‘tell me about it one last time.’ Chauvin hesitated, his eyes somewhere else, still fixed on the back wall. Then he decided to tell her about it as if it were a memory. He had never dreamed, before meeting her, that he would one day want anything so badly.’ And she acquiesced completely?’ Wonderfully.’ Anne Desbaresdes looked at Chauvin absently. Her voice became thin, almost childlike. I'd like to understand why his desire to have it happen one day was so wonderful?’ Chauvin still avoided looking at her. Her voice was steady, wooden, the voice of a deaf person. There's no use trying to understand. It's beyond understanding.’ You mean there are some things like that that can't be gone into?’ I think so.’ Anne Desbaresdes' expression became dull, almost stupid. Her lips had turned pale, they were gray and trembled as though she were on the verge of tears. She does nothing t try and stop him?’ she whispered. No. Have a little more wine.’ She sipped her wine. He also drank, and his lips on the glass were also trembling. Time,’ he said Does it take a long time, a very long time?’ Yes, a very long time. But I don't know anything.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Like you, I don't know anything. Nothing at all.’ Anne Desbaresdes forced back her tears. Her voice was normal, momentarily awake. She will never speak again,’ she said.

Cold, I was, like snow, like ivory. I thought "He will not touch me", but he did. He kissed my stone-cool lips. I lay still as though I’d died. He stayed. He thumbed my marbled eyes. He spoke - blunt endearments, what he’d do and how. His words were terrible. My ears were sculpture, stone-deaf shells. I heard the sea. I drowned him out. I heard him shout. He brought me presents, polished pebbles, little bells. I didn’t blink, was dumb. He brought me pearls and necklaces and rings. He called them girly things. He ran his clammy hands along my limbs. I didn’t shrink, played statue, shtum. He let his fingers sink into my flesh, he squeezed, he pressed. I would not bruise. He looked for marks, for purple hearts, for inky stars, for smudgy clues. His nails were claws. I showed no scratch, no scrape, no scar. He propped me up on pillows, jawed all night. My heart was ice, was glass. His voice was gravel, hoarse. He talked white black. So I changed tack, grew warm, like candle wax, kissed back, was soft, was pliable, began to moan, got hot, got wild, arched, coiled, writhed, begged for his child, and at the climax screamed my head off - all an act. And haven’t seen him since. Simple as that

I'd always tell them that I was hard-of-hearing. One minute they said it didn't bother them, the next they'd tell me to forget it.

Whether children are six or sixteen, they yearn to have a meaningful connection with their parents. If the relationship becomes about control, judgment, reprimands, lectures, and pressure, a child will turn a deaf ear. However, if the relationship is about autonomy, empowerment, kinship, emotional freedom, and authenticity, what child would reject their parents?

Understand, I was a bright and profoundly unimaginative child: Much of what passes for intelligence in children is a stark deafness to metaphor coupled with a pigheaded literal-mindedness.

When I was a teenager in Boston, a man on the subway handed me a card printed with tiny pictures of hands spelling out the alphabet in sign language. I AM DEAF, said the card. You were supposed to give the man some money in exchange. I have thought of that card ever since, during difficult times, mine or someone else's; surely when tragedy has struck you dumb, you should be given a stack of cards that explain it for you. When Pudding died, I wanted my stack. I still want it. My first child was stillborn, it would say on the front. It remains the hardest thing for me to explain, even now, or maybe I mean especially now - now that his death feels like a non sequitur. My first child was stillborn. I want people to know but I don't want to say it aloud. People don't like to hear it but I think they might not mind reading it on a card.

The panther that has stalked you since you were a child is old now. No longer wild, and tired of guarding the treasure you yourself left behind - blind and deaf, she will give it all to you if you just let her go.

Heather was still a dreamer. She'd known she could never be an astronaut since she was a child, that no one would put a deaf girl into a rocket and tell her to reach for the stars, so she'd looked around until she'd found the next best thing, and then she'd done whatever she had to do to make it her own. She was one of the best in her field, and a lot of that was because after giving up on one dream, she 'd be damned before she gave up on another.

Even for a child, the major component of lipreading is guesswork. It’s often said that only 30 to 40 percent of lipreading is actual “reading” of each word; the rest is “context guessing” to fill in the gaps between the words that are actually understood.

When I was 10, a man who worked with my father called for him on the house phone. When I answered he said, ‘Oh, I must have the wrong number. How can a child that speaks like you have a dad that speaks with that ridiculous foreign mess?’ The mess was not that my father pronounces ‘hatred’ to sound like ‘hatriot’. Rather, that there is a whiteness that exists to be so tone-deaf it cannot make out our words, nor our lamp-fixtures, gods, nor our names –where all are as good as the dog-whistle without the Labrador.

Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over animation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the ‘successful’ writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat. Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness. The binge, the fling, the trip — all attempt to shake the film and get back under the dining room table, with a child's beautifully clear eyes.

Deaf, signing parents will “babble” to their infants in sign, just as hearing parents do orally; this is how the child learns language, in a dialogic fashion. The infant’s brain is especially attuned to learning language in the first three or four years, whether this is an oral language or a signed one. But if a child learns no language at all during the critical period, language acquisition may be extremely difficult later. Thus a deaf child of deaf parents will grow up “speaking” sign, but a deaf child of hearing parents often grows up with no real language at all, unless he is exposed early to a signing community.

Deaf people occupy a unique position. They make up the only cultural group where cultural information and language has been predominantly passed down from child to child rather than from adult to child, and the only one in which the native language of the children is different from the language spoken by the parents.

My mother was a braid of black smoke. She bore me swaddled over the burning cities. The sky was a vast and windy place for a child to play. We met many others who were just like us. They were trying to put on their overcoats with arms made of smoke. The high heavens were full of little shrunken deaf ears instead of stars.

In discussions about the sexual abuse of children, the question constantly comes up: Why does the girl’s mother ignore the signals, or why, through her attitude, does she make it impossible for her daughter to confide in her? The mother’s behavior is particularly hard to understand when it turns out that she herself was abused as a child. Yet the key to understanding lies in this information. It is those very mothers who suffered similar abuse in their childhood, and have kept it repressed ever since, who are blind and deaf to the situation of their daughters. They cannot bear to be reminded of their own history, and so they fail the child.

The reason that Fafhrd attached to Bwadres, rather than to any one of a vast number of livelier holy men with better prospects, was that he had seen Bwadres pat a deaf-and-dumb child on the head while (so far as Bwadres could have known) no one was looking and the incident (possibly unique in Lankhmar) had stuck in the mind of the barbarian.

-Lara is a weasel. I've always hated her. The only happy week I had as a child was when she fell from the roof and went into a coma. She came out of it, though. Everyone was so happy. -Is that true? asked James. -No, said Grieve. But they would have been happy. Everyone thinks she's so clever. And I would be happy if she went away and never came back.

Among the many things unknown before becoming a parent is how to handle when the child becomes the teacher. They proffer up parental pearls dispensed to them, and while thinking they'd fallen on deaf ears, the child delivers them back with a simplistic effectiveness using their own words instead of the ones we fumbled and stumbled over, attempting to sound sage.

There, conspicuous in the light of the conflagration, lay the dead body of a woman—the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell. The child moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures. He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries—something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey—a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil. The child was a deaf mute. Then he stood motionless, with quivering lips, looking down upon the wreck.

Michael Sandel uses this thought experiment: Suppose a parent comes to a doctor and says, “My child is going to be born deaf, but I want you to do something to make her able to hear.” The doctor should try, right? But now suppose a parent says, “My child is going to be born able to hear, but I want you to do something to her to make sure she is born deaf.” I think most of us would recoil if the doctor agreed. Our natural instinct is to consider deafness a disability.

On this particular day her father, the vicar of a parish on the sea-swept outskirts of Lower Wessex, and a widower, was suffering from an attack of gout. After finishing her household supervision Elfride became restless, and several times left the room, ascended the staircase, and knocked at her father's chamber-door. 'Come in!' was always answered in a heart out-of-door voice from the inside. 'Papa,' she said on one occasion to the fine, red-faced, handsome man of forty, who, puffing and fizzing like a bursting bottle, lay on the bed wrapped in a dressing-gown, and every now and then enunciating, in spite of himself, about one letter of some word or words that were almost oaths; 'papa, will you not come downstairs this evening?' She spoke distinctly: he was rather deaf. 'Afraid not - eh-h-h! - very much afraid I shall not, Elfride. Piph-ph-ph! I can't bear even a handkerchief upon this deuced toe of mine, much less a stocking or slipper - piph-ph-ph! There 'tis again! No, I shan't get up till tomorrow.' 'Then I hope this London man won't come; for I don't know what I should do, papa.' 'Well, it would be awkward, certainly.' 'I should hardly think he would come today.' 'Why?' 'Because the wind blows so.' 'Wind! What ideas you have, Elfride! Who ever heard of wind stopping a man from doing his business? The idea of this toe of mine coming on so suddenly!... If he should come, you must send him up to me, I suppose, and then give him some food and put him to bed in some way. Dear me, what a nuisance all this is!' 'Must he have dinner?' 'Too heavy for a tired man at the end of a tedious journey.' 'Tea, then?' 'Not substantial enough.' 'High tea, then? There is cold fowl, rabbit-pie, some pasties, and things of that kind.' 'Yes, high tea.' 'Must I pour out his tea, papa?' 'Of course; you are the mistress of the house.' 'What! sit there all the time with a stranger, just as if I knew him, and not anybody to introduce us?' 'Nonsense, child, about introducing; you know better than that. A practical professional man, tired and hungry, who has been travelling ever since daylight this morning, will hardly be inclined to talk and air courtesies tonight. He wants food and shelter, and you must see that he has it, simply because I am suddenly laid up and cannot. There is nothing so dreadful in that, I hope? You get all kinds of stuff into your head from reading so many of those novels.

In these examples, triangulation becomes a defense. Triangulation becomes a way to offset the abuse of power and to get clarity about the wrongs committed. This kind of triangulation occurs in families where one member is abusing his or her power. Like a poor boss, an abusive parent who is deaf to protest gives the children no choice but to talk about that parent. When a parent refuses to hear the issues of adult children, the children turn either to each other or to outsiders, but both sides lose. The parent loses an opportunity for greater closeness with the child and the adult child must grieve the loss of the sought-for resolution that cannot come about.

You will rather think that we should not be angry with people's faults; for what shall we say of one who is angry with those who stumble in the dark, or with deaf people who cannot hear his orders, or with children, because they forget their duty and interest themselves in the games and silly jokes of their companions? What shall we say if you choose to be angry with weaklings for being sick, for growing old, or becoming fatigued? Among the other misfortunes of humanity is this, that men's intellects are confused, and they not only cannot help going wrong, but love to go wrong. To avoid being angry with individuals, you must pardon the whole mass, you must grant forgiveness to the entire human race. If you are angry with young and old men because they do wrong, you will be angry with infants also, for they soon will do wrong. Does anyone become angry with children, who are too young to comprehend distinctions? Yet, to be a human being is a greater and a better excuse than to be a child. Thus are we born, as creatures liable to as many disorders of the mind as of the body; not dull and slow-witted, but making a bad use of our keenness of wit, and leading one another into vice by our example. He who follows others who have started before him on the wrong road is surely excusable for having wandered on the highway.

In the Thriving Season In memory of my mother Now as she catches fistfuls of sun riding down dust and air to her crib, my first child in her first spring stretches bare hands back to your darkness and heals your silence, the vast hurt of your deaf ear and mute tongue with doves hatched in her young throat. Now ghost-begotten infancies are the marrow of trees and pools and blue uprisings in the woods spread revolution to the mind, I can believe birth is fathered by death, believe that she was quick when you forgave pain and terror and shook the fever from your blood Now in the thriving season of love when the bud relents into flower, your love turned absence has turned once more, and if my comforts fall soft as rain on her flutters, it is because love grows by what it remembers of love.

February 20 MORNING “God, that comforteth those that are cast down.” — 2 Corinthians 7:6 AND who comforteth like Him? Go to some poor, melancholy, distressed child of God; tell him sweet promises, and whisper in his ear choice words of comfort; he is like the deaf adder, he listens not to the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely. He is drinking gall and wormwood, and comfort him as you may, it will be only a note or two of mournful resignation that you will get from him; you will bring forth no psalms of praise, no hallelujahs, no joyful sonnets. But let God come to His child, let Him lift up his countenance, and the mourner’s eyes glisten with hope. Do you not hear him sing — “ ’Tis paradise, if thou art here; If thou depart, ’tis hell”? You could not have cheered him: but the Lord has done it; “He is the God of all comfort.” There is no balm in Gilead, but there is balm in God. There is no physician among the creatures, but the Creator is Jehovah-rophi. It is marvellous how one sweet word of God will make whole songs for Christians. One word of God is like a piece of gold, and the Christian is the goldbeater, and can hammer that promise out for whole weeks. So, then, poor Christian, thou needest not sit down in despair. Go to the Comforter, and ask Him to give thee consolation. Thou art a poor dry well. You have heard it said, that when a pump is dry, you must pour water down it first of all, and then you will get water, and so, Christian, when thou art dry, go to God, ask Him to shed abroad His joy in thy heart, and then thy joy shall be full. Do not go to earthly acquaintances, for you will find them Job’s comforters after all; but go first and foremost to thy “God, that comforteth those that are cast down,” and you will soon say, “In the multitude of my thoughts within me Thy comforts delight my soul.

Meanwhile, he continued to speak out on behalf of black citizens. In March 1846, a terrifying massacre took place in Seward’s hometown. A twenty-three-year-old black man named William Freeman, recently released from prison after serving five years for a crime it was later determined he did not commit, entered the home of John Van Nest, a wealthy farmer and friend of Seward’s. Armed with two knives, he killed Van Nest, his pregnant wife, their small child, and Mrs. Van Nest’s mother. When he was caught within hours, Freeman immediately confessed. He exhibited no remorse and laughed uncontrollably as he spoke. The sheriff hauled him away, barely reaching the jail ahead of an enraged mob intent upon lynching him. “I trust in the mercy of God that I shall never again be a witness to such an outburst of the spirit of vengeance as I saw while they were carrying the murderer past our door,” Frances Seward told her husband, who was in Albany at the time. “Fortunately, the law triumphed.” Frances recognized at once an “incomprehensible” aspect to the entire affair, and she was correct. Investigation revealed a history of insanity in Freeman’s family. Moreover, Freeman had suffered a series of floggings in jail that had left him deaf and deranged. When the trial opened, no lawyer was willing to take Freeman’s case. The citizens of Auburn had threatened violence against any member of the bar who dared to defend the cold-blooded murderer. When the court asked, “Will anyone defend this man?” a “death-like stillness pervaded the crowded room,” until Seward rose, his voice strong with emotion, and said, “May it please the court, I shall remain counsel for the prisoner until his death!

My God. How can people be so cruel and thoughtless? They should be thanking you for your service!” “That’s even worse! What the fuck do they think they’re thanking me for? They don’t know what I did over there! They don’t understand that I’ve got seconds to make a judgment call that will either save my guys or end someone’s life—and that someone could be an enemy combatant or it could be a civilian. A farmer. A woman. A child. Or it could be both! That’s the real fucked-up part of it. It could be both a child and the enemy. That kid you’ve been giving candy and comic books to? The one that brought you fresh bread and knows your name and taught you a few words in his language? Is he the one reporting your position? Did he pull the trigger wire on the IED that killed your friend and wounded every single guy in your squad? Has he been the enemy all along? Is it your fault for talking to him?” I was so shocked, I didn’t know what to say. Tears burned my eyes, and my chest ached as I raced along beside him. “Oh, Ryan, no. Of course it isn’t.” “It is. I should have known. I let them down.” “You didn’t,” I said, trying to touch his arm, but he shrugged me off, refusing to be comforted. “And how about the time Taliban fighters lined up women and children as shields behind a compound wall while they fired at you, only you didn’t realize what they’d done until after you’d fired back, killing dozens of innocents?” The tears dripped down my cheeks, but I silently wiped them away in the dark. This wasn’t about me, and I didn’t want him to stop if he needed to get these things out. “Or how about the farmer I killed that didn’t respond to warning shots, the one whose son later told us was deaf and mute? Should I be thanked for that?” I could see how furious and heartsick he was, and I hated that I’d brought this on. “Yes,” I said firmly, although I continued to cry. “Because you’re brave and strong and you did what you were trained to do, what you had to do.

In Ahab and in his beatnik, quasi-criminal prototype, Jackson (in 'Redburn'), Melville gave expression both to the megatechnic 'Khans' of the global Pentagon and to the counter-forces they had brought into being. And the fact that Ahab's torment and hatred had gone so far that he had lost control of himself and, through his own mad reliance upon power, had become dominated completely by the creature that had disabled him, only makes Melville's story a central parable in the interpretation of modern man's destiny. In Ahab's throwing away compass and sextant at the height of the chase, Melville even anticipated the casting out of the orderly instruments of intelligence, so characteristic of the counter-culture and anti-life happenings of today. Similarly, by his maniacal concentration, Ahab rejects the inner change that might have saved the ship and the crew, when he turns a deaf ear to the pleas of love uttered by sober Starbuck in words and by Pip, a fright-shocked child and an African primitive, in dumb gesture. Outwardly mankind is still committed tot he grim chase Melville described, lured by the adventure, the prospect of oil and whalebone, the promptings of pride, an above all by a love-rejecting pursuit of power. But it has also begun consciously to face the prospect of total annihilation, which may be brought about by the captains who now have command of the ship. Against that senseless fate every act of rebellion, every exhibition of group defiance, every assertion of the will-to-live, every display of autonomy and self-direction, at however primitive a level, diminishes the headway of the doom-threatened ship and delays the fatal moment when the White Whale will shatter its planks and drown the crew. All the infantile, criminal, and imbecile manifestations in the arts today, everything that now expresses only murderous hatred and alienation, might still find justification if they performed their only conceivable rational function-that of awakening modern man sufficiently to his actual plight, so that he seizes the wheel and, guided by the stars, heads the ship to a friendlier shore.

91 THE HONESTY OF GOD. An omniscient and omnipotent God who does not even take care that His intentions shall be understood by His creatures could He be a God of goodness ? A God, who, for thousands of years, has permitted innumerable doubts and scruples to continue unchecked as if they were of no importance in the salvation of mankind, and who, nevertheless, announces the most dreadful consequences for anyone who mistakes his truth ? Would he not be a cruel god if, being himself in possession of the truth, he could calmly contemplate mankind, in a state of miserable torment, worrying its mind as to what was truth ? Perhaps, however, he really is a God of goodness, and was unable to express Himself more clearly ? Perhaps he lacked intelligence enough for this? Or eloquence ? All the worse ! For in such a cas6 he may have been deceived himself in regard to what he calls his " truth," and may not be far from being another " poor, deceived devil ! " Must he not therefore experience all the torments of hell at seeing His creatures suffering so much here below and even more, suffering through all eternity when he himself can neither advise nor help them, except as a deaf and dumb person, who makes all kinds of equivocal signs when his child or his dog is threatened with the most fearful danger ? A distressed believer who argues thus might be pardoned if his pity for the suffering God were greater than his pity for his "neighbours"; for they are his neighbours no longer if that most solitary and primeval being is also the greatest sufferer and stands most in need of consolation. Every religion shows some traits of the fact that it owes its origin to a state of human intellectuality which was as yet too young and immature : they all make light of the necessity for speaking the truth : as yet they know nothing of the duty of God, the duty of being clear and truthful in His communications with men. No one was more eloquent than Pascal in speaking of the " hidden God " and the reasons why He had to keep Himself hidden, all of which indicates clearly enough that Pascal himself could never make his mind easy on this point : but he speaks with such confidence that one is led to imagine that he must have been let into the secret at some time or other. He seemed to have some idea that the deus absconditus bore a few slight traces of immorality ; and he felt too much ashamed and afraid of acknowledging this to himself: consequently, like a man who is afraid, he spoke as loudly as he could.

Burbank's power of love, reported Hall, "greater than any other, was a subtle kind of nourishment that made everything grow better and bear fruit more abundantly. Burbank explained to me that in all his experimentation he took plants into his confidence, asked them to help, and assured them that he held their small lives in deepest regard and affection." Helen Keller, deaf and blind, after a visit to Burbank, wrote in Out­ look for the Blind: "He has the rarest of gifts, the receptive spirit of a child. When plants talk to him, he listens. Only a wise child can understand the language of flowers and trees." Her observation was particularly apt since all his life Burbank loved children. In his essay "Training of the Human Plant," later published as a book, he an­ticipated the more humane attitudes of a later day and shocked authori­tarian parents by saying, "It is more important for a child to have a good nervous system than to try to 'force' it along the line of book knowledge at the expense of its spontaneity, its play. A child should learn through a medium of pleasure, not of pain. Most of the things that are really useful in later life come to the children through play and through association with nature." Burbank, like other geniuses, realized that his successes came from having conserved the exuberance of a small boy and his wonder for everything around him. He told one of his biographers: 'Tm almost seventy-seven, and I can still go over a gate or run a foot race or kick the chandelier. That's because my body is no older than my mind-and my mind is adolescent. It has never grown up and I hope it never will." It was this quality which so puzzled the dour scientists who looked askance at his power of creation and bedeviled audiences who expected him to be explicit as to how he produced so many horticultural wonders. Most of them were as disappointed as the members of the American Pomological Society, gathered to hear Burbank tell "all" during a lecture entitled "How to Produce New Fruits and Flowers," who sat agape as they heard him say: In pursuing the study of any of the universal and everlasting laws of nature, whether relating to the life, growth, structure and movements of a giant planet, the tiniest plant or of the psychological movements of the human brain, some conditions are necessary before we can become one of nature's interpreters or the creator of any valuable work for the world. Preconceived notions, dogmas and all personal prejudice and bias must be laid aside. Listen patiently, quietly and reverently to the lessons, one by one, which Mother Nature has to teach, shedding light on that which was before a mystery, so that all who will, may see and know. She conveys her truths only to those who are passive and receptive. Accepting these truths as suggested, wherever they may lead, then we have the whole universe in harmony with us. At last man has found a solid foundation for science, having discovered that he is part of a universe which is eternally unstable in form, eternally immutable in substance.

According to folk belief that is reflected in the stories and poems, a being who is petrified man and he can revive. In fairy tales, the blind destructiveness of demonic beings can, through humanization psychological demons, transformed into affection and love of the water and freeing petrified beings. In the fairy tale " The Three Sisters " Mezei de-stone petrified people when the hero , which she liked it , obtain them free . In the second story , the hero finding fairy , be petrified to the knee , but since Fairy wish to marry him , she kissed him and freed . When entering a demonic time and space hero can be saved if it behaves in a manner that protects it from the effects of demonic forces . And the tales of fortune Council hero to not turn around and near the terrifying challenges that will find him in the demon area . These recommendations can be tracked ancient prohibited acts in magical behavior . In one short story Penina ( evil mother in law ) , an old man , with demonic qualities , sheds , first of two brothers and their sister who then asks them , iron Balot the place where it should be zero as chorus, which sings wood and green water . When the ball hits the ground resulting clamor and tumult of a thousand voices, but no one sees - the brothers turned , despite warnings that it should not , and was petrified . The old man has contradictory properties assistants and demons . Warning of an old man in a related one variant is more developed - the old man tells the hero to be the place where the ball falls to the reputation of stones and hear thousands of voices around him to cry Get him, go kill him, swang with his sword , stick go ! . The young man did not listen to warnings that reveals the danger : the body does not stones , during the site heroes - like you, and was petrified . The initiation rite in which the suffering of a binding part of the ritual of testing allows the understanding of the magical essence of the prohibition looking back . MAGICAL logic respectful direction of movement is particularly strong in relation to the conduct of the world of demons and the dead . From hero - boys are required to be deaf to the daunting threats of death and temporarily overcome evil by not allowing him to touch his terrible content . The temptation in the case of the two brothers shows failed , while the third attempt brothers usually releases the youngest brother or sister . In fairy tales elements of a rite of passage blended with elements of Remembrance lapot . Silence is one way of preventing the evil demon in a series of ritual acts , thoughts Penina Mezei . Violation of the prohibition of speech allows the communication of man with a demon , and abolishes protection from him . In fairy tales , this ritual obligations lost connection with specific rituals and turned into a motive of testing . The duration of the ban is extended in the spirit of poetic genre in years . Dvanadestorica brothers , to twelve for saving haunted girls , silent for almost seven years, but eleven does not take an oath and petrified ; twelfth brother died three times , defeat the dragon , throw an egg at a crystal mountain , and save the brothers ( Penina Mezei : 115 ) . Petrify in fairy tales is not necessarily caused by fear , or impatience uneducated hero . Self-sacrificing hero resolves accident of his friend's seemingly irrational moves, but he knows that he will be petrified if it is to warn them in advance , he avoids talking . As his friend persuaded him to explain his actions , he is petrified ( Penina Mezei : 129 ) . Petrified friends can save only the blood of a child , and his " borrower " Strikes sacrifice their own child and revives his rescuers . A child is a sacrificial object that provides its innocence and purity of the sacrificial gift of power that allows the return of the forces of life.

It was the worst picture she had seen in her life. It was worse than the crying baby in Shanghai. ‘Sometimes we need to see why we fight,’ said the burglar vicar gently. ’We need to see what God sees. Then we can understand just a little better His wrath, and His justice, and His love.’ He slipped the photograph from her hand, put it in the folder, slipped the folder from her. She pulled the pillow over her face and wept. She’d not forget that image, not for the rest of her life. She cried herself deaf for the child and for Arthur Vance; for Murray whose Rocket Kid could not save this child, and for William, because she finally understood what it felt like to be eviscerated. She wept that she could not go and die for this boy. ‘I’m utterly useless!’ she screamed into the pillow, and finally came to her defeated senses. A good cry, and she did not feel better. ‘You are hardly useless,’ said the Burglar Vicar. ‘Oh really? I can’t even sit up.’ ‘You can pray.’ ‘How do you know it does any good?’ ‘It’s better than moping, which does no good at all.” She supposed it would be better to pray than to mope. The Shrew said prayer held them to their tasks. She said she saw before her eyes that it worked. ‘Yes, yes — I can pray!

But young parents, educated middle-class ones anyway, are very jumpy these days, they get so much information from the media about all the things that could be wrong with their child - autism, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, allergies, obesity and so on - they’re in a constant state of panic, watching their offspring like hawks for warning signs.

Since I was a big reader, I might be able to accomplish something. I had no gift. That didn’t mean I must be a deprived person. Besides, why had the Enlightenment poured its seductive light all across the European continent right into the poor endangered households of Ukrainian Jews? Probably, my mother thought, so that a child, any child (even a tone-deaf one), could be given a chance despite genetic deficiency to become, in my mother’s embarrassed hopeful world, a whole person.

Nothing happened on the journey to their hotel, where McGregor took station. He had nothing to report when Sean and I arrived to relieve him in the morning, and nothing untoward happened the following day, either. Unless you counted the excruciating politeness with which Sean and my father treated each other. It screeched at my nerves like a tone-deaf child with their first violin.

A moment may be remembered for a lifetime, but a lifetime is always more than a moment.

But there are those who are not as you and I. These say that all the enchanting fairy romances are lies, that nothing is real that cannot be measured or weighed, seen or heard or handled. Such make their idols of stocks and stones, and are blind and deaf to the things of the spirit. These hard-fingered materialists crush the beautiful butterfly wings of imagination, insisting that pork and pews and public-houses are more real than poetry; that a looking-glass is more real than love, a viper than valour. These Gradgrinds give to the children the stones which they call facts, and deny to the little ones the daily bread of dreams.

Voyagers, I’ve always wanted to write about you. And now, at 4:41 a.m. on an autumn morning, Words have found their way into my mind. I picture myself like you— Distant from life, Alone, Yet moving towards an unknown destination! Like you, in the early stages of my journey, I could see, I could gather knowledge and transmit it, I was useful and efficient. But sometimes, to keep connected to the world, To be able to stay on course and conserve my energy, I had to shut parts of myself down, To survive, To go blind, to be deaf, to be isolated, and just occasionally signal my existence to the world. The same thing I do, that you do, that so many others do. The boundless reaches of space Have become somewhat more comprehensible through you, Yet the depths of the human soul remain unfathomable, And its pain incurable. We live in an age surrounded by a torrent of information, Yet somehow, we remain lonely and lost. Language has advanced, There are words for nearly everything, Everyone can describe their own state of mind, yet we’re still at war with one another. Earth has turned into a vast ship, Perhaps like Noah’s Ark, With maximum diversity and multiplicity, Yet everyone on this ship plays their own tune, rallies their own cause! Someone steps forward, claiming each individual’s thoughts and personal benefit are like rare pearls to be cherished, While another insists that collective welfare takes precedence, That the needs of the masses outweigh individual desires. Some launch movements to claim their rights, While others start movements to flaunt the rights they’ve acquired. No one knows what they truly want; We’re all still lost. I don’t know how Earth looks from afar— Perhaps like a blueberry-flavored lollipop, A lollipop with a stick, But Earth’s stick is an invisible one made of sorrow. I find something common among all the passengers on this ship, All the inhabitants of this blueberry lollipop: sorrow. A fetus in its mother’s womb is also like a lollipop, But connected by an umbilical cord. As a fetus, Growing in the mother’s womb, Suffering, malnutrition, and physical ailments can be painful for us. If the mother’s state is stable, We may enjoy brief periods of security and calm, but after that, We must endure the pain of separation, Learn how to breathe, And besides the sorrow of leaving security behind, We face new emotions like fear and anger. Later in life, We each take our own path. No matter how much they try to show humans as social creatures, It’s always the individual who walks their own way, who has the freedom to choose, Even if one finds the meaning of their path in joining a group or a collective, it’s their individual choice that put them on that path. Today, people have countless options to join others who are like them, And these options themselves bring confusion, And when you join a group out of confusion, You treat the other groups with hostility. Science, philosophy, religion, politics…each of them has thousands of branches, and each branch Wants to disprove the other, cleanse itself of its shameful past. Freedom of speech has become an excuse for verbal assaults and psychological wounds, Non-violence has become a breeding ground for new and emerging dictators, For heartless sects and brutal factions. Knowledge and science alone cannot save us, Just as religion couldn’t. I don’t want to write about chaos, Life isn’t that disorganized, In some corner of the world, A lover is staring up at his beloved’s window, A child is laughing joyfully. But writing about sorrow, Speaking of chaos and Asking questions can reveal where we stand. Now, we know so much about space, And about the Sun, too. The James Webb telescope has mapped out the cosmos for us, and countless projects are underway for the future, crafted with flawless precision and extraordinary coherence, but the rift between humans remains deep.

In Ahab and in his beatnik, quasi-criminal prototype, Jackson (in 'Redburn'), Melville gave expression both to the megatechnic 'Khans' of the global Pentagon and to the counter-forces they had brought into being. And the fact that Ahab's torment and hatred had gone so far that he had lost control of himself and, through his own mad reliance upon power, had become dominated completely by the creature that had disabled him, only makes Melville's story a central parable in the interpretation of modern man's destiny. In Ahab's throwing away compass and sextant at the height of the chase, Melville even anticipated the casting out of the orderly instruments of intelligence, so characteristic of the counter-culture and anti-life happenings of today. Similarly, by his maniacal concentration, Ahab rejects the inner change that might have saved the ship and the crew, when he turns a deaf ear to the pleas of love uttered by sober Starbuck in words and by Pip, a fright-shocked child and an African primitive, in dumb gesture. Outwardly mankind is still committed tot he grim chase Melville described, lured by the adventure, the prospect of oil and whalebone, the promptings of pride, an above all by a love-rejecting pursuit of power. But it has also begun consciously to face the prospect of total annihilation, which may be brought about by the captains who now have command of the ship.

The children I describe here have horizontal conditions that are alien to their parents. They are deaf or dwarfs; they have Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; they are prodigies; they are people conceived in rape or who commit crimes; they are transgender. The timeworn adage says that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, meaning that a child resembles his or her parents; these children are apples that have fallen elsewhere—some a couple of orchards away, some on the other side of the world. Yet myriad families learn to tolerate, accept, and finally celebrate children who are not what they originally had in mind.

One day a partially deaf four years old child came home with a note in his pocket from his teacher, “Your Tommy is too stupid to learn, get him out of school.” His mother read the note and answered, “My Tommy is not too stupid to learn, I will teach him myself.” And that Tommy grew up to be the great Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison had only three months of formal schooling.

The importance of interaction The role of interaction between a language-learning child and an interlocutor who responds to the child is illuminated by cases where such interaction is missing. Jacqueline Sachs and her colleagues (1981) studied the language development of a child they called Jim. He was a hearing child of deaf parents, and his only contact with oral language was through television, which he watched frequently. The family was unusual in that the parents did not use sign language with Jim. Thus, although in other respects he was well cared for, Jim did not begin his linguistic development in a normal environment in which a parent communicated with him in either oral or sign language. A language assessment at three years and nine months indicated that he was well below age level in all aspects of language. Although he attempted to express ideas appropriate to his age, he used unusual, ungrammatical word order. When Jim began conversational sessions with an adult, his expressive abilities began to improve. By the age of four years and two months most of the unusual speech patterns had disappeared, replaced by language more typical of his age. Jim’s younger brother Glenn did not display the same type of language delay. Glenn’s linguistic environment was different from Jim’s: he had his older brother—not only as a model, but, more importantly as a conversational partner whose interaction allowed Glenn to develop language in a more typical way. Jim showed very rapid acquisition of English once he began to interact with an adult on a one-to-one basis. The fact that he had failed to acquire language normally prior to this experience suggests that impersonal sources of language such as television or radio alone are not sufficient. One-to-one interaction gives children access to language that is adjusted to their level of comprehension. When a child does not understand, the adult may repeat or paraphrase. The response of the adult may also allow children to find out when their own utterances are understood. Television, for obvious reasons, does not provide such interaction. Even in children’s programmes, where simpler language is used and topics are relevant to younger viewers, no immediate adjustment is made for the needs of an individual child. Once children have acquired some language, however, television can be a source of language and cultural information.

HELP! Theatre, come to my rescue! I am asleep. Wake me I am lost in the dark, guide me, at least towards a candle I am lazy, shame me I am tired, raise me up I am indifferent, strike me I remain indifferent, beat me up I am afraid, encourage me I am ignorant, teach me I am monstrous, make me human I am pretentious, make me die of laughter I am cynical, take me down a peg I am foolish, transform me I am wicked, punish me. I am dominating and cruel, fight against me I am pedantic, make fun of me I am vulgar, elevate me I am mute, untie my tongue I no longer dream, call me a coward or a fool I have forgotten, throw Memory in my face I feel old and stale, make the Child in me leap up I am heavy, give me Music I am sad, bring me Joy I am deaf, make Pain shriek like a storm I am agitated, let Wisdom rise within me I am weak, kindle Friendship I am blind, summon all the Lights I am dominated by Ugliness, bring in conquering Beauty I have been recruited by Hatred, unleash all the forces of Love.

Binet himself worried about the potential misuse of the tests he designed. He insisted they were not a measurement, properly speaking. He argued that intelligence comes in many different forms, only some of them testable by his or by any test. His understanding of different skills, aptitudes, or forms of intelligence was probably closer to that of educator Howard Gardner’s concept of “multiple intelligences” than to anything like a rigid, measurable standard reducible to a single numerical score.21 His words of caution fell on deaf ears. Less than a year after Binet’s death in 1911, the German psychologist William Stern argued that one could take the scores on Binet’s standardized tests, calculate them against the age of the child tested, and come up with one number that defined a person’s “intelligence quotient” (IQ).22 Adapted in 1916 by Lewis Terman of Stanford University and renamed the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, this method, along with Binet’s test, became the gold standard for measuring not aptitude or progress but innate mental capacity, IQ. This was what Binet had feared. Yet his test and that metric continue to be used today, not descriptively as a relative gauge of academic potential, but as a purportedly scientific grading of innate intelligence.

Back in Clemens's office, he and I talk about the proliferation of disciplines with the word studies in their names. "Anything with studies in it, avoid!" Clemens says. What about Cultural Studies? "That bullshit comes into the classroom in papers." He mentions Monterey's Sign Language Program, which was "founded with the best intentions" but which actually "promotes deafness" in the name of political correctness. "Just think of not healing a child who can't hear because it's an offense against deaf culture!

Prayer 1: Prayer for Guidance   “O my Lord, Open my heart, to envision the path, the path that you selected for me To feel thy rays of light amidst the dark, to envision where you would lead me. Open my deaf ears to thy holy voice, The voice that guides me though the noise Make my heart so soft that it melts to your grace, Embrace my soul that it knows where to face Guide my mind that I comprehend your affection, Strengthen my legs that they follow your direction, Till the time I establish my life’s purpose, Till the time I reach my destination, Then I would have no fear of getting astray, Like a child whose mother isn’t far away!

Rachel’s the first one to speak. “So—he told you.” “Told me what?” “Come on, Hal. What’s changed since yesterday?” Rachel sneaks one arm out of her jacket cocoon to give Hallelujah a soft punch in the shoulder. “I may not be at my best right now, but I’m not blind.” She pauses. “Or deaf.” Hallelujah feels her face get hot. “Oh. What did you hear?” “Bits and pieces. I was really out of it last night, after . . . whatever that was. After almost freezing to death.” Rachel shudders. “I have to say, it was totally obvious from the get-go that Jonah liked you.” “It was?” Hallelujah is still surprised. She still doesn’t quite believe it. “Um, yeah. Or did you think he’s out here for me?” Rachel says slowly, as if to a child, “You followed me. He followed you.

The Deaf and Dumb Mother.—The late Countess of Orkney, who died at an advanced age, was deaf and dumb, and was married in 1753 by signs. She resided with her husband at his seat, Rostellan, near Cork. Shortly after the birth of her first child, the nurse saw the mother cautiously approach the cradle in which the infant lay asleep, evidently full of some deep design. The Countess, having first assured herself that her babe was fast asleep, took from under her shawl a large stone, which had purposely been concealed there, and, to the utter horror of the nurse, who largely shared the popular notion that all dumb persons are possessed of peculiar cunning and malignity, raised it up, as if to enable her to dash it down with greater force. Before the nurse could interpose to prevent what she believed would bring certain death to the sleeping and unconscious child, the dreadful stone was flung, not at the cradle, however, but upon the ground, and fell with great violence. The noise awakened the child. The Countess was overjoyed, and, in the fulness of a mother's heart, she fell upon her knees to express her thankfulness that her beloved infant possessed a blessing denied to herself—the sense of hearing. This lady often gave similar indications of superior intelligence, though we can believe that few of them equalled the present in interest. Filial

I used to think of you, when ye were small,” Jamie was saying to Bree, his voice very soft. “When I lived in the cave; I would imagine that I held ye in my arms, a wee babe. I would hold ye so, against my heart, and sing to ye there, watching the stars go by overhead.” “What would you sing?” Brianna’s voice was low, too, barely audible above the crackle of the fire. I could see her hand, resting on his shoulder. Her index finger touched a long, bright strand of his hair, tentatively stroking its softness. “Old songs. Lullabies I could remember, that my mother sang to me, the same that my sister Jenny would sing to her bairns.” She sighed, a long, slow sound. “Sing to me now, please, Da.” He hesitated, but then tilted his head toward hers and began to chant softly, an odd tuneless song in Gaelic. Jamie was tone-deaf; the song wavered oddly up and down, bearing no resemblance to music, but the rhythm of the words was a comfort to the ear. I caught most of the words; a fisher’s song, naming the fish of loch and sea, telling the child what he would bring home to her for food. A hunter’s song, naming birds and beasts of prey, feathers for beauty and furs for warmth, meat to last the winter. It was a father’s song—a soft litany of providence and protection. I

What images do I associate with the Christmas music as I see them set forth on the Christmas Tree?... An angel, speaking to a group of shepherds in a field; some travelers, with eyes uplifted, following a star; a baby in a manger; a child in a spacious temple, talking with grave men; a solemn figure, with a mild and beautiful face, raising a dead girl by the hand; again, near a city gate, calling back the son of a widow, on his bier, to life; a crowd of people looking through the opened roof of a chamber where he sits, and letting down a sick person on a bed, with ropes; the same, in a tempest, walking on the water to a ship; again, on a sea-shore, teaching a great multitude; again, with a child upon his knee, and other children round; again, restoring sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, hearing to the deaf, health to the sick, strength to the lame, knowledge to the ignorant; again, dying upon a cross, watched by armed soldiers, a thick darkness coming on, the earth beginning to shake, and only one voice head. "Forgive them, for they know not what they do!

On the last day of the Jewish year, the child is present at the solemn ceremony of Rosh Hashanah. He hears thousands of slaves cry out in unison, “Blessed be the Almighty!” Not so long ago, he too would have knelt down, and with such worship, such awe, such love! But this day, he does not kneel, he stands. The human creature, humiliated and offended in ways that are inconceivable to the mind or the heart, defies the blind and deaf divinity. I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes now, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom

Oh!" cried the young man. "A little deaf child! How sweet! We should adopt her and teach her to write symphonies. She'll be all the rage in town. I'll buy her a powdered wig and a tricorne!

February 13 The Devotion of Hearing Speak; for Thy servant heareth. 1 Samuel 3:10 Because I have listened definitely to one thing from God, it does not follow that I will listen to everything He says. The way in which I show God that I neither love nor respect Him is by the obtuseness of my heart and mind towards what He says. If I love my friend, I intuitively detect what he wants, and Jesus says, “Ye are My friends.” Have I disobeyed some command of my Lord’s this week? If I had realised that it was a command of Jesus, I would not consciously have disobeyed it; but most of us show such disrespect to God that we do not even hear what He says, He might never have spoken. The destiny of my spiritual life is such identification with Jesus Christ that I always hear God, and I know that God always hears me (John 11:41). If I am united with Jesus Christ, I hear God by the devotion of hearing all the time. A lily, or a tree, or a servant of God, may convey God’s message to me. What hinders me from hearing is that I am taken up with other things. It is not that I will not hear God, but that I am not devoted in the right place. I am devoted to things, to service, to convictions, and God may say what He likes but I do not hear Him. The child attitude is always “Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth.” If I have not cultivated this devotion of hearing, I can only hear God’s voice at certain times; at other times I am taken up with things—things which I say I must do, and I become deaf to Him, I am not living the life of a child. Have I heard God’s voice to-day?

to leave a child without language for a moment longer than is absolutely necessary seems cruel to me.

Over a period of time, the midwife noticed that there were special souls being born across the land; babies that had old souls and an incredible awareness of what is. These children were in some way handicapped for reasons she couldn’t comprehend. Some couldn’t speak properly and had difficulty in communicating verbally. Others were deaf and some were blind; they were born as outcasts but had an uncanny ability to see things others couldn’t see.

There is no such thing as mercy, no such thing as compassion; there is only forgetting; there is only humiliation and the pain of endless memory. That is the lesson we brought with us from the country we came from, and it is a lesson we have not forgotten. Screaming and shouting are like Pavlov's bell to us; we are deaf to everything else. Catching the scent of terror is child's play to us; nothing tickles our nostrils more.

By climbing up into his head and shutting out every voice but his own, "Civilized Man" has gone deaf. He can't hear the wolf calling him brother—not Master, but brother. He can't hear the earth calling him child—not Father, but son. He hears only his own words making up the world. He can't hear the animals, they have nothing to say. Children babble, and have to be taught how to climb up into their heads and shut the doors of perception. No use teaching women at all, they talk all the time, of course, but never say anything. This is the myth of Civilization, embodied in the monotheisms which assign soul to Man alone.

baby, took her into his arms, sat down, and rocked her to sleep. When the student emerged from his prayers, he was shocked and embarrassed to find his master in his house, holding his baby. “Master,” he said, “what are you doing? Why are you here?” “I was walking in the street when I heard crying,” he responded, “so I followed it and found her alone.” “Master,” the student replied, “I was so engrossed in my prayers that I did not hear her.” The master replied, “My dear student, if praying makes one deaf to the cries of a child, there is something flawed in the prayer.

A snapshot memory, circa 1955: I'm draped over Dad's shoulder, bouncing along in time with his stride. It's a hot day and we're strolling through a fairground. Beside us, Verna clings to Mom's hand. A cob of corn has slipped from my sweaty clutches, and I'm shrieking at full lung capacity to have it retrieved. Bobbing over Dad's shoulder, I can see that tasty morsel - sticky with grit, no doubt - receding into the distance, and I'm furious. My parents, facing the other direction, are oblivious to my rising howls of protest. Big sister ignores me. Curious onlookers wander by, but I'm not at all self-conscious. I want that cob of corn, and I want it now! Nothing else matters... I learned soon enough that my parents would never react to my verbal outbursts unless they were facing me. If they couldn't see my face, it didn't count. I'm not sure when that realization dawned, but I know it was early. I recall, as a small child, running into another room to tug on Mom's arm. I knew instinctively that shouting would be useless. From my infancy, the deaf-hearing dynamic shaped every part of our mother-child communication. Specifics elude me; I only knew that I understood her, and she understood me. Most likely, we used a blend of speaking, signs, and gestures. If I had to describe it, I'd call it mother-talk, that intimate connection that happens between mothers and their offspring. You know how they just understand each other? Well, that's how it was, with us. Excerpt from Patricia Conrad's Gentle into the Darkness, p. 68

I decided that I was going to live my life, in spite of the mess it had become.

The first instance I find of any person executed for witchcraft was in June 1648. Margaret Jones of Charlestown was indicted for a witch, found guilty, and executed. She was charged with having such a malignant touch that if she laid her hands upon man, woman or child in anger, they were seized presently with deafness, vomiting, or other sickness or some violent pains.

A Hamas leader named Nizar Rayyan was killed. He was buried under the rubble of his house with fifteen of his family, mostly his children, the youngest aged 2. On TV, I watched when a man pulled out a headless child, another with no arm or leg. So small I couldn’t tell if boy or girl. Hate ignores such details. The houses were not Hamas. The kids were not Hamas. Their clothes and toys were not Hamas. The neighborhood was not Hamas. The air was not Hamas. Our ears were not Hamas. Our eyes were not Hamas. The one who ordered the killing, the one who pressed the button thought only of Hamas. My brother Hudayfah was born deaf and mute.

Given these benefits, it might be surprising to hear that the National Association of the Deaf did not see this medical device as a miracle. In 1991, the organization wrote an official statement that derided the research and the device. The statement raised a number of concerns, but most relevant for us is this: There is now abundant scientific evidence that, as the deaf community has long contended, it comprises a linguistic and cultural minority. Many Americans, perhaps most, would agree that as a society we should not seek the scientific tools nor use them, if available, to change a child biologically so he or she will belong to the majority rather than the minority—even if we believe that this biological engineering might reduce the burdens the child will bear as a member of a minority.45

I want too much. I always have. And all the while I am aware of a larger despair, as if Helen & I are vessels for the despair of all women and many men too. Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our ‘progress,’ so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform? Charlotte wrote that rumors are flying about Howard and Paul, and Howard might lose his job at Yale. And her nephew, getting his PhD at Wisconsin, was declared insane and committed to a state asylum when they discovered he was a leader in the Communist Party there. I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I can find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world. But the world is deaf. The world—and really I mean the West—has no interest in change or self-improvement and my role it seems to me on a dark day like today is merely to document these oddball cultures in the nick of time, just before Western mining and agriculture annihilate them. And then I fear that this awareness of their impending doom alters my observations, laces all of it with a morose nostalgia. This mood is glacial, gathers up all the debris as it rolls through: my marriage, my work, the fate of the world, Helen, the ache for a child, even Bankson, a man I knew for 4 days and may easily never see again. All these pulls on me that cancel one another out like an algebraic equation I can’t solve.

Like those who see the glass as half-empty, the traditional view of deaf people focuses only on what is not there—the missing ability to hear. From that starting point, the assumption follows that all the consequences of this condition must be negative, and the picture painted is of deaf people leading lonely, depressing, isolated lives, with minimal educational achievement and low rates of employment. In the traditional view, if parents realize that they have a deaf child, they should be pitied for the struggles they will face with their handicapped child.

Falitz began running seminars for the group, but she never understood why Terrace was hiring people who did not know ASL for an ASL project. Wambach's criticism went further. She thought that Nim should have been raised in a deaf family from infancy. Giving him to the LaFarges was like putting a child in an Italian family to learn German.

The hearing-sighted often try to control our access to the world. Either like my parents did, by not telling me I was going blind, or the way our government does by not giving all DeafBlind free access to SSP's or requiring that all parents of Deaf and DeafBlind babies learn sign language immediately, so they have a common language with their child. In my opinion, without mandated access, the world is being stolen from us.

the staff should work with each child to achieve “a mutually recognized mutual understanding, or a mutually recognized interiority to a same world.” To arrive at this understanding—this “intersubjectivity”—staff members should try to enter and inhabit their patients’ kinesthetically experienced reality, a reality that Goode characterizes as “thin,” immediate, unpredictable, and therefore dangerous.27

I am clamour. I am avarice. I am not part of this world in front of me. I am not compatible with it. Grass grows upon the sky. Reptiles spend the day in pursuit of the sun. Night belongs to the moon. Wind passes through the rivers. Rain turns ice-cold to fall like shooting stars. But only me…I am crude and simple, confined and trapped in this insignificant form. A great sorrow fermented inside me, but not a single tear ran down my cheek. My weaknesses were on full display. I was the petulant child stamping my feet for attention, a clown putting on a show in the hope that someone would watch. But no one did. Nature turned a deaf ear to tantrum. I’ve spoken before…lamented many times my loneliness. I’ve also spoken of the many kinds of loneliness experienced by countless numbers of people. But the more I say about this, the more embarrassed I feel. I stand alone on the earth, unable to bring the show to an end.

The term deaf is often overused and misunderstood, and may be applied inappropriately to describe the various types of hearing loss. It can be defined as referring to those for whom the sense of hearing is nonfunctional for the ordinary purposes of life. IDEA 2004 (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, or PL 108–446) describes deafness as a hearing loss that adversely affects educational performance and is so severe that the child is impaired in processing linguistic information (communication) through hearing, with or without amplification (hearing aids). The term Deaf, used with a capital D, refers to those individuals who want to be identified with Deaf culture. It is inappropriate and misleading to use the term deaf in reference to any hearing loss that is mild or moderate in degree.

A visitor at a school for the deaf was writing questions on the board for the children. Soon he wrote this sentence: “Why has God made me able to hear and speak, and made you deaf?” The shocking sentence hit the children like a cruel slap on the face. They sat paralyzed, pondering the dreadful word “Why?” And then a little girl arose. With her lip trembling and her eyes swimming with tears, she walked straight to the board. Picking up the chalk, she wrote with a steady hand these precious words: “Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure” (Matt. 11:26). What a reply! It reaches up and claims an eternal truth upon which the most mature believer, and even the youngest child of God, may securely rest—the truth that God is your Father.

A child’s humors might be able to weaken that impression. Or a healthy parent’s seed could sometimes counter a diseased one. The defect still lurked in the child, who could then pass it down to its own children. If they didn’t inherit a countervailing seed from their other parents, the disease could flare up out of hiding. Some hereditary diseases could be treated, Mercado argued, but only slowly and incompletely. “Let us in some secluded spot teach the deaf and dumb to speak by forming and articulating the voice,” he wrote. “By long practice many with hereditary affliction have regained their speech and hearing.” But for the most part, a doctor could do little, because the stamp of heredity was sealed away from a physician’s reach. Mercado urged instead that people with the same defect not marry, because their children would be at greatest risk of developing the same hereditary disease.

I stroked every inch of his golden skin. Sucked his earlobes. I know the quality of the hair in his armpit. I fingered the dimples in his upper lip. I poured red wine in his navel and drank its spill. There's no place on my body his lips did not turn into bolts of lightning. Oh God..I have to stop reliving our lovemaking. I have to forget how new it felt every single time. Both fresh and somehow eternal. I'm tone deaf, but fucking him made me sing.

saw things in Africa that made me less cynical about the Clinton Foundation. Under tamarind and mahogany trees, aid workers set up a station where deaf children from the local villages could be fitted with their first hearing aids. It’s hard to care about whether some sleazy foreign donor wants something from the State Department after you’ve seen a child hear for the first time. And when the

Pak Yoo was a different person in English than in Korean. In a way, he supposed, it was inevitable for immigrants to become child versions of themselves, stripped of their verbal fluency and, with it, a layer of their competence and maturity. Before moving to America, he'd prepared himself for the difficulties he knew he'd experience: the logical awkwardness of translating his thoughts before speaking, the intellectual taxation of figuring out words from context, the physical challenge of shaping his tongue into unfamiliar positions to make sounds that didn't exist in Korean. But what he hadn't known, hadn't expected, was that this linguistic uncertainty would extend beyond speech and, like a virus, infect other parts: his thinking, demeanor, his very personality itself. In Korean, he was an authoritative man, educated and worthy of respect. In English, he was a deaf, mute idiot, unsure, nervous, and inept. A bah-bo.

I love the analogy used in the book The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson—when a child is upset, he “flips his lid.” This means that the upstairs part of the brain—the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that makes rational decisions and allows for self-control—is not available to the child. Therefore, all the reasoning in the world or explanations will fall on deaf ears. We need to first help them close the lid by giving them support to calm down. We can offer them a cuddle; we don’t assume that they want one. Some children like to be cuddled to help them calm down. Some children will push us away. If they push us away, we make sure they are safe and we can offer them a cuddle when they are calm. We are saying it’s okay for them to melt down. Rather than trying to get the tantrum to stop as soon as possible, allow them to express all their feelings safely until they are calm, and show that we are there to help if they need us. And, once they are calm, we can help them make amends if needed.

But who runs like the rest past these arrives At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized, As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom – The eye satisfied to be blind in fire, By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear – He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him More than to the visionary his cell: His stride is wildernesses of freedom: The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.

Blindness separates me from things; deafness separates me from people. —Helen Keller

When he was twenty-four, André floated down to Saigon and returned with a wife standing upon his prow. Eugenia was the eldest child of Pierre Cazeau, the stately, arrogant owner of the Hôtel Continental, on rue Catinat. She was also deaf. Her tutors had spent the first thirteen years of her life attempting to teach her how to speak like a hearing person, as was dictated by the popular pedagogy of the time. Her tongue was pressed, her cheeks prodded, countless odd intonations were coaxed forth from her lips. Cumbersome hearing horns were thrust into her ears, spiraling upward like ibex horns. It was a torture she finally rejected for the revolutionary freedom of sign, which she taught herself from an eighteenth-century dictionary by Charles-Michel de l’Épée that she had stumbled upon accidentally on the shelf of a Saigon barbershop.1 Based on the grammatical rules of spoken language, L’Épée’s Methodical Sign System was unwieldy and overly complex: many words, instead of having a sign on their own, were composed of a combination of signs. “Satisfy” was formed by joining the signs for “make” and “enough.” “Intelligence” was formed by pairing “read” with “inside.” And “to believe” was made by combining “feel,” “know,” “say,” “not see,” plus another sign to denote its verbiage. Though his intentions may have been noble, L’Epée’s system was inoperable in reality, and so Eugenia modified and shortened the language. In her hands, “belief” was simplified into “feel no see.” Verbs, nouns, and possession were implied by context. 1 “So unlikely as to approach an impossibility,” writes Røed-Larsen of this book’s discovery, in Spesielle ParN33tikler (597). One could not quite call her beautiful, but the enforced oral purgatory of her youth had left her with an understanding of life’s inherent inclination to punish those who least deserve it. Her black humor in the face of great pain perfectly balanced her new husband’s workmanlike nature. She had jumped at the opportunity to abandon the Saigon society that had silently humiliated her, gladly accepting the trials of life on a backwater, albeit thriving, plantation. Her family’s resistance to sending their eldest child into the great unknowable cauldron of the jungle was only halfhearted—they were in fact grateful to be unburdened of the obstacle that had kept them from marrying off their two youngest (and much more desirable) daughters. André painstakingly mastered Eugenia’s language. Together, they communed via a fluttering dance of fingertips to palms, and their dinners on the Fig. 4.2. L’Épée’s Methodical Sign System From de l’Épée, C.-M. (1776), Institution des sourds et muets: par la voie des signes méthodiques, as cited in Tofte-Jebsen, B., Jeg er Raksmey, p. 61 veranda were thus rich, wordless affairs, confluences of gestures beneath the ceiling fan, the silence broken only by the clink of a soup spoon, the rustle of a servant clearing the table, or the occasional shapeless moan that accentuated certain of her sentences, a relic from her years of being forced to speak aloud.