I have featured Bertrand Russell before in this post. Recently I received from a friend an excerpt of something attributed to Russell. Googling around led me to discover the prologue of Russell’s Autobiography. The prologue is called “What I have Lived for” and here is how it goes:

“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 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 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 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.”

Through this prologue Russell demonstrates how a person might live his life in the absence of god. It is a primer, a manual, a guide for the godless. And I realise that unconsciously that is how I have endeavoured to fashion my own life. Three of my greatest passions have always been love, knowledge and sympathy. To love madly without caution, without prudence, to hunger to know and learn and to feel the suffering of fellow human beings – this is what I strive to do, this is what I aspire for in my life. And it suffices. I do not have god simply because I do not see the need for it.