It is frustrating, but ultimately, she benefits from this practice of thinking and analyzing the world in different ways. She expresses her frustration with being presented with different interpretations, hypotheses, and analyses for the materials she is studying, none of which is more right than any other, and none of which brings her particularly closer to discovering truth.

Helen uses this simile when explaining why college is not the 'Universal Athens' she thought it would be. 'Again and again I ask impatiently, 'why concern myself with these explanations and hypotheses?' They fly hither and thither in my thought like blind birds beating the air with ineffectual wings.' (Chapter 20, pg. She describes the way it felt to meet the other blind girls through a simile about being a foreigner who finally returns to her own country, putting it in terms that her audience can understand. A basic human desire is to be surrounded by others who can truly sympathize with you, and only a person who is similarly handicapped can understand Helen.

While Helen benefits greatly from her one-on-one education with Miss Sullivan, she is invigorated when she attends the Perkins Institute for the first time and meets other blind girls. In the school where Laura Bridgman was taught I was in my own country.' (Chapter 9, pg. 'What a joy to talk with other children in my own language! Until then I had been like a foreigner speaking through an interpreter. In this way, Helen comes to understand love. Here, she compares love to clouds in the sky: she cannot touch them, but she knows they are there, and that they bring beauty and life to the world. In order to explain abstract concepts like love to Helen, Miss Sullivan must use simile to make the young girl understand the things that she cannot physically touch. You cannot touch love either but you feel the sweetness it pours into everything.' (Chapter 6, pg. You cannot touch the clouds, you know but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. 'Love is something like the clouds that were in the sky before the sun came out. It is easy to forget the more negative moments of childhood, and she worries that she will not be telling her story accurately.

She describes the mist as golden-a warm, positive adjective-in order to emphasize that her recollections of childhood all blur together in a positive haze of learning and experiencing. Helen describes her hesitation with writing down her own history with a beautiful simile that compares her hazy memories of childhood to a veil of golden mist. Buy Study Guide 'I have, as it were, a superstitious hesitation in lifting the veil that clings about my childhood like a golden mist.' (Chapter 1, pg.

Meaning of story of my life song