被我教過【大一英文】或是【英文寫作】的學生一定知道這一篇文章，不知道的人最好不要出聲，不然也許可以考慮開始服用銀杏了。

前幾天和姊妹校領隊來教授英語夏令營的 Dr. Robyn Tiedmann 聊天，講到羅素，兩個人都激動到必須站起來說話：他表演《數學原理》全文幾大冊只是要證明 1+1 = 2 的那種激動，我則是表演 《數學原理》羅素在劍橋大草原推著一車手稿付印的樣子! 兩個瘋子!!! 這兩個瘋子在講到羅素自傳時候再度站起來，因為我說我每一本年記的第一頁都貼 "What I Have Lived For," 而最後一頁貼的是 "The Heart Sutra." 接著兩個人開始用五根手指頭逐段演繹這一篇精美的文章.......

What I Have Lived For

By Bertrand Russell

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 the 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.

Prologue to The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967)

等我哪一天又要教大一英文，我就會再出克漏字讓學生填充，目的就是所有人都要全對。