Not Enough Love

I am posting this poem because love is a very good but tumultuous thing. It comes and goes. It raises you up and then throws you to the pits of hell when it leaves. Even when you give and give and give, you seem to miss something along the way and that something comes back to haunt and torment you. So you forgot to say hello to Miss So and so, now she wants to destroy you. Or you happen to have said hello to someone that Miss So and so does not like and because you are showing love to someone else, she wants to destroy you again. Why cannot a person who is loving just be loved back? Why is love always so complicated?


Bertrand Russell:c

Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.

adapted