Le vendredi 10 octobre 1997 00:00:00 UTC-7, Huzon Furst a écrit :
I have seen the following attributed to Bertrand Russell:
"The center of me is always and eternally a terrible pain - a curious
wild pain - a searching for something beyond what the world contains."
...but no cite. Is it genuine? Where does it come from? Thanks in
advance.
Bertrand Russell wrote this phrase in a letter to one of his numerous lovers, the actress, Lady Constance (née Annesley) Malleson (1895-1975). Their affair was apparently from 1916 whilst he was married, but estranged from his first wife Alys P. Smith.
It ended about 1920. Lady Constance sold her letters from Bertrand Russell to McMaster University where the personal records of Bertand Russell are housed. They are at the University's Mill's Memorial Library in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. McMaster
purchased his collection in 1968, and Lady Constance sold her letters to McMaster sometime after that, but before her death in 1975.
By the way quote so oft published is incomplete. Here is the complete paragraph transposed from his letter to Lady Constance:
I am strangely unhappy because the pattern of my life is
complicated, because my nature is hopelessly complicated;
a mass of contradictory impulses; and out of this, to my
intense sorrow, pain to you must grow. The centre of
me is always and eternally in terrible pain, a curious, wild
pain, a searching for something, beyond what the world
contains, something transfiguring and infinite - the beatific
vision - God - I do not find it, I do not think it is to be
found - but the love of it is my life - it's like a passionate
love for a ghost. At times it fills me with rage, at times
with wild despair, it is the source of gentleness and
cruelty and work, it fills every passion that I have - it
is the actual spring of life within me.
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