In a later book, The World I Live In, Keller again described her birth into selfhood: “Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. . . . I had neither will nor intellect. . . . I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking.”9 Helen’s “tactual” memories—memories based only on touch—could not be shared. But language opened up the possibility of joining a community. At age eight, when Helen went with Anne to the
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