Desirée Ann

What I Have Lived For
The Prologue to Bertrand Russell's 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.
We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals.
Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice,
man and civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of his knowledge
and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.
We patronized them for their incompleteness;
for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves.
The animals shall not be measured by man.
In a world more older and more complete than ours
they move finished and complete,
gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never obtained,
living by voices we shall never hear.
They are not bretheren.
They are not underlings.
They are other nations,
caught without selves in the net of life and time;
fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail with the Earth.
-Henry Beston, The Outermost House