Wednesday, May 7, 2014

What I have lived for




What I have lived for

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 the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy- ecstasy do great that I would often had sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness in which one shivering 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 thought it might seem too good for human life. This what at last I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the heart of men. I have wished to know why the 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 heaven. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echos of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people, a hated burden on 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 can not, 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. (Russel 1872-1970)