View Helen Keller's typewritten speech in the Helen Keller Archive
Transcription
"For Harvard University"
President Pusey, Professors, Students and Friends,
A more moving event could not have happened to me than the generous sign of recognition from Harvard University of one who was once entombed in the silent dark. My thank (sic) cannot be measured in words but in the warm regard which the University has always had in my heart as an inspirer of great scholarship and lives consecrated by the love of freedom.
To think that fifty years ago my liberator Anne Sullivan and I were pacing the streets of Cambridge and attending lectures at Radcliffe College with a generation of girls who also were seeking out new paths of thought and action, and now I stand alone on the earth side of life's curtain bearing witness to her pentecostal achievement!
While in India I saw a tree, the banyan, which resembles my life. Facing drought and other inclemencies of the weather, it yet finds ways to send out little shoots from its extremities, and they drop into the ground, take root and put on branches, leaves, flowers and fruit like the parent tree. My teacher's individuality was like the banyan. Her work for my development seemed to have no root or seed in human experience. Yet with faith and courage she created me as a little shoot which she trusted would fall into good soil and shape itself under her watchful eye as a normal human being. This thought thrills me with a fresh sense of the spiritual resources which she exemplified and which have the power to reorganize life in unexpected forms.
With the unfaltering belief which my teacher's work instilled into me I look forward to a new earth and heaven of possibilities. I have just flown home from the Far East where new hopes and dreams are trying their wings for realization in the lives of uncounted multitudes, and I am full of a deep concern for their future. Flashes from their aspirations and ideals and beautiful instances of their will to assist the blind, the deaf and other unfortunate groups have electrified me, and I am convinced that what they need most is not the dication (sic) of any country's way of life but rather understanding and encouragement. Surely that should be among America's vital responsibilities towards mankind. To understand is essential to progress. Wise statesmen study the true situation in other countries beside their own so that they may more fully serve this purpose. America should also be in the vanguard, planting banyans of enlightened understanding of other peoples' history and evolution, their manner of living and their chances of future well being. Only through the meeting of minds and hearts everywhere can the earth be blessed with true Civilization and the sun of its peace.
