What I have Lived for
Bertrand Russell
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and
the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of dispair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy － ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of my life for a few hours for this joy. I have sought it, next, because it
releaves[relieves] loneliness － that terrible loneliness in which one shivering
conciousness[consciousness] looks over the rim [of] the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, [and] though it might seem too good for human life, this is what - at last - I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always
pitty[pity] brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people
ahated[a hated] burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
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