What I Have Lived For

Three passions, simple but 1)overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and 2)unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, in a 3)wayward course, over a deep ocean of 4)anguish, reaching to the very 5)verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings 6)ecstasy, ecstasy so great that I would often have 7)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 8)unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic 9)miniature, the 10)prefiguring vision of the heaven that 11)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 12)apprehend the 13)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 14)oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their pain make a 15)mockery of what human life should be. I long to 16)alleviate the evil, but I can't, 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.