NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 1 –33Three Days to See (Helen Keller) — Let us think and reflect

It symbolises the perfect, balanced design of nature — the fact that even the smallest and most ordinary thing is made with order and beauty.

A leaf is even on both sides of its midrib; the veins repeat in a pattern. Keller cannot see any of this, yet her fingers find it. So the phrase also symbolises how much beauty is available to a person who pays attention — and, by implication, how much beauty sighted people walk past every day without noticing.

1. “the smooth skin of a silver birch”
2. “the rough, shaggy bark of a pine”

The phrase ‘awakening Nature after her winter's sleep' refers to the coming of spring, when trees that stood bare and lifeless through the winter put out their first buds and the whole natural world begins to grow again.

C. admiring

C. knowledge

Because before sunrise the world lies still, dark and silent, exactly as a sleeping person does — and the sunrise then “awakens” it into movement, colour and noise.

The image is a personification, and Keller uses it twice in the essay: Nature has a “winter's sleep” in the first extract, and here the earth has a night's sleep. In both cases the return of light or warmth is described as waking up. The device also lets her put the sun in the role of the one who wakes the earth — which is why she says she would “behold with awe”.

The writer wishes to dedicate the day to a brief look at the present and past world because she has only one day for the whole of it, and the museums hold the “condensed history of the earth” — animals and the races of men in their native environment, and the carcasses of dinosaurs and mastodons — so in a few hours she could see the entire pageant of man's progress that took millions of years to unfold.

Because the whole passage is imaginary. She has not been given three days of sight; she is describing what she would do if she were. ‘Should' here is the older form of ‘would' in the first person, and it keeps every sentence in the world of supposing.

Repeating it also gives the passage the rhythm of a wish repeated over and over, which is how a long-held longing actually sounds. And it is a modal verb, so it links directly to the grammar you learn on page 34 of this lesson.

For Helen Keller, touch does the work of two missing senses, and it does a great deal of it.

She opens the essay by saying she finds “hundreds of things to interest me through mere touch”. But the word ‘mere' is important: she also admits the limit. She can read only the “obvious” emotions, and she says plainly that if touch gives so much pleasure, sight must reveal far more. Touch compensates generously — it does not replace.

She reasons from what she already has. If mere touch — the smallest sample of the world, gathered through fingertips — gives her so much delight, then the sense that takes in a whole landscape at once must be far richer: “If I can get so much pleasure from mere touch, how much more beauty must be revealed by sight.”

Two further reasons appear in the essay:

• Sight reaches the person, not just the surface. “I do not know what it is to see into the heart of a friend through that ‘window of the soul', the eye.” Touch gives her the outline of a face; only the eye would give her the person behind it.
• Sight takes in the whole at once. A dawn — “the magnificent panorama of light with which the sun awakens the sleeping earth” — cannot be touched at all.

That is why she ends: “But of all the senses, I am sure that sight must be the most delightful.” Notice the honesty of “must be” — she is judging a sense she has never had.

Her advice — “use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind” — asks us to imagine life without a sense. Anyone who does that honestly, even for two minutes, stops feeling superior.

• It replaces pity with respect. The essay is not a complaint; it is full of delight. We learn that a person who cannot see is not a person to be felt sorry for but one who experiences the world differently and often more attentively.
• It teaches us not to waste what they lack. It is unkind to own a sense and never use it. Keller notices the symmetry of a leaf; most of us walk past a whole tree.
• It makes us practical. Understanding that touch and hearing carry the load leads to real help — Braille books, screen readers, tactile paths, ramps, announcements in speech as well as text — as Anuj's mother explains in the listening passage of this lesson.
• It changes how we speak. We stop describing people by what they cannot do and start treating them as classmates who need one adjustment, not endless sympathy.

According to the author, imagining the loss of a sense is the only way to make people value and actually use what they have.

She notices that human beings take for granted whatever they have always had, and pay attention only to what they might lose: “use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind.” The imagined loss works like a deadline — it turns an ordinary day into the last day, and a person suddenly looks properly.

She then applies the same method to every sense: “Hear the music of voice, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again.”

She asks people to treat every ordinary experience as if it were the last one of its kind.

She sums it up in one instruction: “Make the most of every sense; glory in all the facets of pleasure and beauty, which the world reveals to you through the several means of contact, which Nature provides.”

The order she chooses is itself the answer.

Notice what is missing. There is no wish to see gold, jewels, palaces, famous monuments or her own face. Given only three days, she spends them on people, knowledge and ordinary human life.