NCERT Book Class 11 English (Woven Words) Essay 2 My Three Passions

150 Woven Words

2 My Three Passions
Bertrand Russell

F From the context of the passage, guess the meaning of the words
and phrases in the box

wayward course ocean of anguish verge of despair
mystic miniature unfathomable abyss
apprehend reverberate

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 least 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 over
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