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a few days, and revealed to her a time-gap beyond comprehension or bearing, and that she has subsequently been forced to “re-block” herself and the possibility of any similar reaction to L-DOPA ever happening again. She continues to look much younger than her years; indeed, in a fundamental sense, she
is
much younger than her age. But she is a Sleeping Beauty whose “awakening” was unbearable to her, and who will never be awoken again.

A DEAF WORLD
    We are remarkably ignorant about deafness, which Dr. Johnson called “one of the most desperate of human calamities”—much more ignorant than an educated man would have been in 1886, or 1786. Ignorant and indifferent. During the last few months I have raised the subject with countless people and nearly always met with responses like: “Deafness? Don’t know any deaf people. Never thought much about it. There’s nothing
interesting
about deafness, is there?” This would have been my own response a few months ago.
    Things changed for me when I was sent a fat book by Harlan Lane called
When the Mind Hears: A History of the
Deaf,
which I opened with indifference, soon to be changed to astonishment, and then to something approaching incredulity. I discussed the subject with my friend and colleague Dr. Isabelle Rapin, who has worked closely with the deaf for twenty-five years. I got to know better a congenitally deaf colleague, a remarkable and highly gifted woman, whom I had previously taken for granted. 14 I started seeing, or exploring for the first time, a number of deaf patients under my care. My reading rapidly spread from Harlan Lane’s history to
The Deaf Experience,
a collection of memoirs by and about the first literate deaf, edited by Lane, and then to Nora Ellen Groce’s
Everyone Here
Spoke Sign Language,
and to a great many other books. Now I have an entire bookshelf on a subject that I had not thought of even as existing six months ago, and have seen some of the remarkable films that have been produced on the subject.
    The text of this selection has been edited slightly from its original form in
Seeing Voices.
    One more acknowledgment by way of preamble. In 1969 W. H. Auden gave me a copy, his own copy, of Deaf
ness,
a remarkable autobiographical memoir by the South African poet and novelist David Wright, who became deaf at the age of seven. “You’ll find it fascinating,” he said. “It’s a wonderful book.” It was dotted with his own annotations (though I do not know whether he ever reviewed it). I skimmed it, without paying more attention, in 1969. But now I was to rediscover it for myself. David Wright is a writer who writes from the depths of his own experience—and not as a historian or scholar writes about a subject. Moreover, he is not alien to us. We can easily imagine, more or less, what it would be like to be him (whereas we cannot without difficulty imagine what it would be like to be someone born deaf, like the famous deaf teacher Laurent Clerc). Thus he can serve as a bridge for us, conveying us through his own experiences into the realm of the unimaginable. Since Wright is easier to read than the great mutes of the eighteenth century, he should if possible be read first—for he prepares us for them. Toward the close of the book he writes:
    Not much has been written about deafness by the deaf. Even so, considering that I did not become deaf till
after
I had learned the language, I am no better placed than a hearing person to imagine what it is like to be born into silence and reach the age of reason without acquiring a vehicle for thought and communication. Merely to try gives weight to the tremendous opening of St. John’s Gospel: In the beginning was the Word. How does one formulate concepts in such a condition?
    It is this—the relation of language to thought—that forms the deepest, the ultimate issue when we consider what faces or may face those who are