EDITH RUSSELL TO S.K. TRIVEDI, 6 JULY 1973
BRACERS 133446. AL(D). Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
Proofread by K. Blackwell

6 July 1973
Plas Penrhyn

Dear Mr Trivedi

Thank you for your letter of 1 June. Your two questions are so comprehensive and unlimited that they can hardly be answered. I knew Bertrand Russell increasingly well for almost 50 years. I knew many of his friends and read his books and many of his articles as they appeared. During the last 20 years I knew him intimately. In all this time I grew to love and admire him increasingly and for the last 20 years to love and admire him entirely with all my mind and heart and being — I still do. If you consider these facts, drawing upon your own knowledge and experience and imagination, I think that you will understand that there is no possibility of answering your questions completely.

Your assessment of the importance of Bertrand R’s “honest, sincere and universal compassion” seems to me just. It is a generous outward-turning attitude. Among the many things that I learned from him were how desirable and how difficult such active compassion as his is of achievement. It demands not only great love, but a rigorous examination of own’s <one’s> own motives and actions and reactions as well as those of others and very rigorous self-discipline. It demands the cultivation of a mind and sensitivity open and keen and discriminating; of a determination to find and to face facts and to act upon them courageously — to be willing against all odds to uphold those that make for human happiness and to condemn those which do not, and to admit, always, fresh facts and the changes of opinion and action that they may necessitate. And it demands the cultivation and exercise of wide-ranging imagination — and much else, of which not least, in order to keep the balance and preserve sanity, are the accepted virtues of good nature and humour, kindness and gentleness. In short it demands the enjoyment and fulfilment of all one’s capabilities. In achieving all or any part of this, I think that Bertrand R’s own writings are now the greatest help that one can find.

I shall be glad to hear from you again. But I cannot promise to reply. Indeed, I can almost promise not to reply!

With all good wishes,

Yrs sinc.