What I Have Lived for
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 enthusiasm-enthusiasm 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 comprehend 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 echoed 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.