罗素是我非常喜爱的数学家,哲学家,教育家(..好多家阿),他在数理逻辑和分析哲学上做了很多奠定性的工作,却获得了诺贝尔文学奖。
这样才华横溢的一个人,是如何评价自己的生命价值的呢?
84岁时,罗素在自传里用了一篇短文评价和总结他的一生,这篇短文便是 “What I have lived for”, 原文如下
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.
如果说我们创建17bdc.com 还有些些野心的话,那么跟罗素的后两个追求也是想通的,我们希望自身和所有的用户们,永不停止对知识(不仅仅是英语)和真理的追求;同时也能发展出一个健康有效的社区,能够让这个世界变得有那么一点点不一样。