There are in this country about 75,000 people who were never able to hear. There are also about half a million who have lost all or part of their hearing, and more than one million in addition who must use some contrivance to aid their ears. This army, nearly as large as the one sent overseas, is forced to live a strange and mysterious life, which most normal persons know nothing about, even though they come into daily contact with the outposts. The ordinary deaf man is usually regarded as a joke or a nuisance, according to the humor of his associates. This social condition is largely due to the fact that he has found no place in literature; he occupies an abnormal position because his story has never been fairly told. The lame, the halt and the blind have been driven or gently led into literature. Poem, essay and story have described their lives, their habits, their needs; as a result the average person of reasonable intelligence has a fair notion of what it is like to be crippled or blind. But no one tells what it is like to be deaf. No one seems to love a deaf man well enough to analyze his thought or to describe the remarkable world in which he must live apart, although he may be close enough to his companions to touch them and to see their every action. Very likely this is our own fault; perhaps we have no right to expect the public to do for us what we should do for ourselves. I have long felt that we are sadly handicapped socially through this failure to put our life and our strange adventures into literature—the deaf person must remain a joke or a tragedy until he has made the world see something of the finer side of his life in the silence. This is why I have attempted to record these “adventures.” I am aware that it is rather a crude pioneer performance. Beginnings are rarely impressive. Much as we respect the pioneer of years ago, very few of us would care to house and entertain him today. It is my hope that this volume will lead other deaf persons to record their experiences, so that we may present our case fully to the public. The great trouble is that we find it so easy to make a genuine “tale of woe” out of our experience; it is hardly possible to avoid this if we record honestly. Perhaps we “enjoy the thought of our affliction” so thoroughly that we do not realize that the reading public has no use for it. My own method of avoiding this has been to turn the manuscript over to my daughter and to walk away from it, leaving her entirely free to cut the “grouch” out of it with the happy instruments of youth and hope and music. With us the great adventure of life is to pass contentedly from the world of sound into the world of silence and there strive to prepare ourselves for the world of serenity which lies beyond.
H. W. COLLINGWOOD.