What I have Lived For
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 scrificed 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 the
saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and thought 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 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.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it
again if the chance were offered me.
