So, for me, well, this... I was introduced to a... a culture within our culture. I’d never really thought much about cultural things, but deaf people have a vivid sense of their own history. There is a sort of oral, or if you want, manual culture, in which deaf poets and storytellers would sign their stories or poems. There was a… there have been theatres for the deaf, and when I went to Gallaudet I... I talked about the hearing-impaired, and one of the students there said, 'Why don’t you look at yourself as Sign-impaired?' And it was a very interesting turning of the tables, because there were a thousand students all conversing in Sign, and I was the inarticulate one who could understand nothing and communicate nothing, at least in Sign. I later learnt a little Sign, but I was no good at it, I am no good at languages, unlike an older brother of mine in Australia who was a genius with languages and had 30 of them. But I... I was never much good.

But, it was astonishing to meet people who viewed life in a... in a different way, as later it was astonishing on this little coral atoll on Micronesia, to find a subculture of... of these colour-blind people who… I remember when I first went there, I was at one point…had seven colour-blind people with me, and they indicated that, really, I was the defective one. They said, 'You shouldn’t think of us as colour-blind'. They said, 'Colour is probably of no interest anyhow. Think of yourself as being insufficiently sensitive to texture and surface and boundary and line and depth and movement'. When I first communicated with a... a woman with congenital colour blindness in San Francisco, I said I’d like to meet her. She said, 'I won’t see you if you regard me as a patient, you will have to acknowledge that my vision is different, but not inferior to yours'. And so, similarly, deaf with a capital D means... ethnically different, linguistically different. Deaf people are very insistent, often, on using a capital D; deaf with a small d means medically deaf. So, for me, again, this was an acute expansion of interests so that language and culture from a very different angle became especially interesting to me.