What I Have Lived For
——The Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography
Russell, Bertrand Arthur William (1872-1970)
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.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872—1970) was a British philosopher, logician, essayist, and social critic, best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. His most influential contributions include his defense of logicism (the view that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic), and his theories of definite descriptions and logical atomism. Along with G.E. Moore, Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of analytic philosophy. Along with Kurt G del, he is also regularly credited with being one of the two most important logicians of the twentieth century.
词汇注释：
1)overwhelminglyadv.不可抵抗地
2) unbearable a. 无法忍受的
3) wayward a.任性的
4) anguish n.痛苦，苦恼
5) verge n. 边缘
6)ecstasy n.入迷
7) sacrifice n.牺牲
8)unfathomable adj.深不可测的
9)miniature n. 缩图，缩影
10)prefigure v.预示
11)saint n. 圣人
12) apprehend v. 领会，理解
13) Pythagorean a.毕达哥拉斯的
14) hold sway 支配，统治
15) flux n. 流动，变化
16) oppressor n.压迫者
17) mockery n.嘲笑
18)alleviate v.使（痛苦）易于忍受，减轻
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