What I Have Lived For

Bertrand Russell, from the prologue of his Autobiography

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible 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 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 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 heavens. But always 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 a 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 this 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.

God

Give me a green patch and I swear I will grow and sprawl and blossom and spew forth life in the most illuminating array of colors and depths.

I will dig my fingers into the earth and grow them down into the soil like roots. I will tear open my chest, and through the cracked ribs love will flow out like water upon the earth, will saturate the roots, will grow me into a tree so magnificent and so beautiful that the leaves will breach the heavens.

From the top I will look upon the cloud floor and blow a fever upon the wind. I will breathe this fever into a fire and with blood and rage and pain I will burn the world to utter ashes.

When the last cry is silenced, when the last breath of life expired, I will weep from every pore, will mourn the death of this miraculous world, will wring every drop from every green limb, and from this outpouring I will wet the ashes of the world and grow a new one--this time, a world grown from love and the knowledge of what was lost, and not fear of worlds unknown.