每次看高比例地圖都有浮士德初得法術時的感動：
這樣的土地生養這麼多的生物，怎麼看都是自己的渺小。
小時候有一種恐懼，深怕外星人看地球的樣子和我們觀察蒼蠅一個模樣。
記得自己問過小學四年級的老師：「我們會不會只是被外星人關在玻璃瓶裡的蒼蠅？」問的時候那種害怕現在還感覺得出來。
當時阿姆斯壯登陸月球才只是三年前的事，課本上貼了星條旗插上月球的圖片。那是「人類的一大步。」老師當然也用科學合理的方式釋疑，方便安頓小朋友的恐懼。
長大了之後，這種恐懼反而加深，連Google Earth Search Engine 和 Hubble Telescope 的確切證據都無法安撫。
這種自量渺小的覺識其實是宗教式的極限體驗，羅素將之化為「去宗教、可實踐」的生命目標：愛、知識與同情。
YV在每一本年/日誌札記上都貼了這一篇小文章，只是遺憾自己似乎永遠做不到萬分之一：
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 great 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 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.
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Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) won the Nobel prize for literature for his History of Western Philosophy and was the co-author of Principia Mathematica.
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