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
whichone 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.
