BR TO LUCY M. DONNELLY, 25 NOV. 1902
BRACERS 58432. ALS. McMaster. Auto. 1: 167–8
Edited by Maria Forte. Proofread by K. Blackwell

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14, Cheyne Walk,
Chelsea, S.W.1^, 2
Nov. 25. 1902

Dear Lucy

Many thanks for your letter. I am grateful to you for writing about yourself: after all, people can tell one nothing more interesting than their own feeling towards life. It is a great comfort that you are so much better, and able to enjoy life again. All that you write about the little most people get out of experience is most true: but I was not thinking, when I wrote, of “experiences”, but of the inward knowledge of emotions. This, if one is rightly constituted, requires an absolute minimum of outward circumstances as its occasion; and this it is that is required for the development of character and for certain sorts of writing. But there is not profit in feeling unless one learns to dominate it and impersonalize it. — For people like you and me, whose main business is necessarily with books, I rather think experience of life should be as far as possible vicarious. If one has instinctive sympathy, one comes to know the true history of a certain number of people, and from that one can more or less create one’s world. But to plunge into life oneself takes a great deal of time and energy, and is, for most people, incompatible with preserving the attitude of a spectator. One needs, as the key to interpret alien experience, a personal knowledge of great unhappiness; but that is a thing which one need hardly set forth to seek, for it comes unasked. When once one possesses this key, the strange, tragic phantasmagoria of people hoping, suffering, and then dying, begins to suffice without one’s desiring to take part, except occasionally to speak a word of encouragement where it is possible.

I have not been reading much lately: FitzGerald’s letters have interested me, also the new Cambridge Modern History, where one gets a connected view of things one has read before in a very fragmentary fashion. Gilbert Murray’s translations of Euripides are out, and I recommend them to you (published by George Allen). I have been trying to be interested in Politics, but in vain — the British Empire is unreal to me, I visualize the Mother Country and the Colonies as an old hen clucking to her chickens, and the whole thing strikes me as laughable. I know that grave men take it seriously, but it all seems to me so unimportant compared to the great eternal facts. And London people, to whom the Eternal is represented by the Monthlies, to which they rise with difficulty from the daily papers, strike me as all puppets, blind embodiments of the forces of nature, never achieving the liberation that comes to man when he ceases to desire, and learns at last to contemplate. Only in thought is man a God: in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.

Please give my love to Helen, and write again when you have time. Alys goes on well on the whole, and is, I hope, not going to have any very serious relapses.

Yours very sincerely
Bertrand Russell

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  [document] Proofread against the original letter. BR marked the last paragraph to be omitted.

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  [envelope] Miss Lucy Donnelly | Low Buildings | Bryn Mawr | Pa. | U.S.A.