Why the Stars Shine

A few months ago I was browsing through a comic book store with my friends Orli and Skim. You’d think a nerd like me would be a devourer of comic books/graphic novels, but I’ve actually only read a few series. Although those series (Y: The Last Man, Sandman & Transmetropolitan, for the curious) have been pretty roundly fabulous, I’ve just never started reading regularly. In fact, at that point I’d never bought a single comic book.

However, as we were browsing, I noticed a single bulky black-covered volume with the word LOGICOMIX written boldly across the top. After a moment’s further inspection, I cried out, “A graphic novel about Bertrand Russell!”, scooped it up into my arms, and brought it to the check-out counter.

I finished the novel in about an hour. (This is perhaps one of my problems with graphic novels - they go so quickly! They’re like the cotton candy of story-telling, they disappear even as you consume them.) The book was actually rather disappointing. The framing was way too self-referential for me - the authors draw themselves discussing Russell discussing himself - and I was hoping that the novel would go a little further into the meat of Russell’s work.

I thought they did a good job sketching out its importance and explaining why the search for the logical foundations of mathematics was so compelling to him. But they didn’t present much of his actual ideas. I found the scenes where he works himself to exhaustion on some undescribed problem to be frustrating - what is he getting stuck on? Why don’t his solutions work? Don’t just show me his furrowed brow and mangled collar. Let me inside his head! Of course, I understand why they made this choice. Getting across these mathematical complexities is a challenge of a whole other magnitude, but others popularizers have done it, and the fact that they dealt with Russell’s work from such a distance left me a little bored.

That said, I don’t regret buying it! Bertrand Russell was one of my childhood favorites, along with Carl Sagan and Joseph Campbell (and yes, it must be admitted, also Leonardo DiCaprio and the Backstreet Boys). My parents owned a copy of his autobiography, and when I read the introduction for the first time I felt afire with recognition:

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.

This captured my middle school emotions perfectly. Not that I think Russell is childish - or, god forbid, middle-school-ish - but there’s a certain drama to the way he speaks. Part of growing up, for me, has been realizing that great passions should not overwhelm the comforting minutiae of life: having tea with a close friend, solving a crossword puzzle or sewing a new shirt, cleaning your room with the radio on full blast, helping a stranger carry their bags, communing with neighborhood kittens. Reading this passage now, I still identify with it. But I’m also exhausted by it. You can see in it Russell’s lifelong struggles with depression. I’ve always meant to read his Conquest of Happiness, a later work of his and one which seems to more directly address the question: which is more important - passion, achievement, knowledge, and greatness… or happiness?