When he began writing The Principles of Mathematics, nearly fifty years earlier, the literary world seemed quite alien to him. Constrained by logic, he had little regard, for example, for the philosopher Henri Bergson, himself awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927 for L’Évolution créatrice, a work that, in Russell's view, did not contain "from beginning to end, a single line of reasoning" and was therefore more aesthetic than logical.
While Descartes practised mathematics as a diversion from boredom, Russell's passion for mathematics was a consoling distraction, an escape from despair (see "A century of passionate living"). As a young student at Cambridge, however, he resolved "not to take up a profession and to devote [his] life to writing", without surrendering to the imagination or abandoning reason. This life choice allowed him to remain true to his youthful quest: the search for truth. His compatriot Thomas Stearns Eliot, winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature, would therefore regard the award as "a deserved, if belated, tribute to the author of The Philosophy of Leibniz, the Principia and the other works that sustained me thirty-five years ago", admiring Russell's precise, direct style, often enlivened by a touch of irony.
This Nobel Prize, awarded to those "who have conferred the greatest benefit on humankind", seems richly deserved by this remarkable man of letters, philosopher, mathematician and logician, though his inability to fit neatly into any category would long leave him relatively little known.
