Three passions like great winds

In his short essay 'What I Have Lived For' (the book calls it 'My Three Passions'), the philosopher Bertrand Russell says that three simple but very strong passions have ruled his life:

• the longing for love;
• the search for knowledge;
• unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

Like great winds, these passions have blown him this way and that, over a deep ocean of anguish (great pain), right to the edge of despair.

He has sought love for three reasons:

• first, because it brings ecstasy, a joy so great that he would have given all the rest of his life for a few hours of it;
• next, because it relieves loneliness: that terrible loneliness in which one shivering mind looks over the edge of the world into the cold, empty universe;
• finally, because in the union of love he has seen, in a small, mystical picture, a vision of heaven, as saints and poets have imagined it.

This, he says, is what he sought, and, though it might seem too good for human life, this is what he has at last found.