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Aug 13, 2019

"The limits of my language means the limits of my world." --Ludwig Wittgenstein

A Man Without Words: The Story of a Contemporary Miracle

"When I met this man he was twenty-seven years old. Because he didn't know there was sound, because he didn't know he was deaf, he didn't know there was hearing and deafness. He studied lips and mouths. He knew something was happening. He's a very smart man. He'd be staring at lips. He'd stare at your mouth and he'd stare at this person's lips and he thought he was stupid. He thought he was stupid because he thought we had figured this mouth-movement stuff out visually...One of the things that attracted me to him more than anything else--the intelligence in his eyes caught my eye--but more than that, he hadn't given up. I can't imagine going twenty-seven years thinking I was stupid and watching mouths. The most frustrating thing I can imagine. He didn't know what language was. He didn't know what sound was, but he knew something was happening and he wanted to know what that something was." Susan Schaller shares the remarkable story of what happened next in this interview.