bertrand and i

have you ever read someone elses writing and felt oddly (or rightly) at home? as if someone had read your very thoughts, organized them better than you could have and written them out for all to read? this happened to me just the other night. having decided to be a bit of a nerd and refresh myself on some of plato’s philosophy (1. dont ak me why and 2. yes, im THAT big of a nerd) i linked across to a certain bertrand russell. philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, socialist, pacifist, and social critic – a thinker/writer with most of the bases covered.

at the age of 84, russell published What I have lived for, a short prologue to his growing autobiography. summarizing his work and life.

it reads as follows:

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 deep 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 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.

-br

while ol’ bertrand and i may disagree on other areas of philosophy (he was a self-proclaimed agnostic who was rather critical of christianity) the words he wrote here i believe we share quite closely. hopefully, after ive become a tired, old man i can look back on my life and utter the same words bertrand did: “This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

hopefully.