I first read Bertrand Russell’s What I Have Lived For when I was eighteen.
Around the same time, I read his autobiography in full. I already admired him then, but the final sentence of that short piece did not strike me as strongly as it does now.
I have had a screenshot of the piece saved on my phone for several years. When I have been thinking too much, or when the day has been particularly difficult, I sometimes open it and read it again.
The sentence I return to is the last one:
I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
The part that stays with me is not primarily I have found it worth living. It is would gladly live it again. There is something almost astonishing about that claim.
To have lived through disappointment, error, loss, uncertainty, conflict, aging, and whatever else a life contains, and then to say not merely that the whole thing was tolerable, or that the good outweighed the bad, but that you would gladly take it again: I do not quite know what state of mind makes such a sentence possible.
I feel something close to awe when I read it.
One of the reasons I have admired Russell is that he did not seem afraid of revising himself.
I do not admire him because I think he was always right. Almost the opposite. What I admire is the willingness to accept that a position may have failed, even when it was once important to him, and to continue without treating revision as humiliation.
There is something particularly impressive about a person who can hold a position firmly and still abandon it when he no longer thinks it can be defended.
For me, the possibility that I may be wrong can easily become a reason not to commit too strongly in the first place. If a belief may later require revision, I am tempted to weaken my attachment to it now. If a decision may turn out badly, I may hesitate to inhabit it fully. If a conclusion is provisional, I may treat provisionality as a reason not to give it much weight.
Russell seems to represent another possibility. One may revise and still have lived. One may abandon conclusions without treating everything that came before as invalid. One may discover that a structure was wrong without deciding that the effort spent building it was therefore wasted.
Perhaps this is part of why his final sentence affects me so much.
It was not written by someone whose life, at least as I understand it, depended on preserving a single final position. Yet he could still look back and say something final about the life itself.
I do not know whether I will be able to do that. I am still not sure what would justify saying that life, in itself, is worth living. I am not sure what ultimately justifies many of the choices made within it either.
Sometimes the problem appears even larger than that.
I live at a time when technology seems capable of changing almost every structure around me faster than I can understand it. Work, art, knowledge, relationships, and the distinction between what humans make and what nonhuman systems make increasingly seem unstable. The more I look at the scale of those changes, the less control an individual life appears to have.
I do not know what the world will look like in five years. I do not know which of the things I am building now will still matter. I do not know whether the skills I acquire, the work I do, or the assumptions on which I organize my life will survive the systems being constructed around them.
There is a familiar temptation here: if the grounds are incomplete and the consequences uncontrollable, perhaps I should withhold judgment. But Russell’s sentence does not seem to require that everything have been under control. Nor does it seem to require that every choice have been justified in advance.
It is retrospective. The life has already happened. The errors have already been made. The positions have already changed. The losses cannot be reversed. After all of that, the person looks back and says: I would take it again.
I think this is closer to what I want than any general proof that life is valuable. I do not especially want to prove, now, that life is worth living.
I want the person I become at the end of mine to be able to say that his was.
This is one of the few questions on which I do not feel a strong desire to remove myself from the picture. Usually, I am tempted to step outside my own preferences and ask what could justify them independently of me. Here, strangely, I do not want to do that. I want that future judgment to be mine.
I want to have lived in such a way that, whatever I come to believe by then, I can look back without needing to erase the mistakes, correct the failures, or pretend that the painful parts were actually good.
I do not need them to have been good. I think I only want to be able to include them. Perhaps that is what would gladly live it again means to me.
Not that every part deserves repetition. Not that suffering becomes justified because something beautiful happened later. Not even that I would choose every event again if each one were offered separately. It is closer to refusing to reject the life as a whole.
I cannot say that yet.
But I have noticed something that surprises me. There are already parts I would choose again.
If I were born again, I would want to be my father’s son.
I would want love again.
There is another one, which I would not have expected myself to say a few years ago.
I would want music again.
That last one still feels strange.
There was a period when I genuinely wanted nothing to do with music. Now I play guitar again. I listen again. If I imagine another life without music in it, I am not sure I would choose that version.
There are too many parts of my life I cannot yet evaluate, too many things still happening, and too many possibilities I do not know how to place.
But Russell’s sentence no longer feels entirely foreign to me.
I do not know what I will believe at the end of my life. I hope I will have changed my mind many times before then. I hope I will still be capable of changing it.
I also hope that after all those revisions, all the things I could not control, and all the choices I made without sufficient grounds, I will be able to look back and say something simple.
I would gladly live it again.
Related: Uncertainty and Participation, Control and the Uncontrollable, Rigour as Paralysis, Firmness Without Finality, Ground and Gravity, Weight and Assent