Imagination could not grasp, even if sympathy could sustain, all this planet's inescapable human misery and animal pain at once. No man living could ever measure the one or alleviate the other. During the 1940s, millions of men and women and beasts lived in torture or died in agony, starved in famine or were liquidated in explosion. He must perforce accept the quantitative limits which Nature, insulating his personality, sets for him here or else set up his own. However distressed a man may be when confronted by depressing national situations or by painful international tragedies, knowing that he can do nothing about them, that they are beyond his limited power as a single individual to influence, alter, or reshape, he will have to let the responsibility for them rest on the proper shoulders and accept the lesson in karma's working. He is not a second Atlas to bear the enormous burden of the whole world's accumulated agony on his little shoulders. Nevertheless, given a man who is at all sensitive enough to respond emotionally to all the piled-up misery that lies around him, imaginative enough to recall it even when he is isolated from it by good fortune, can such a one remain immured in his own individuality and become impassive enough to live undistressed by the woes of others, untouched by their cries? Hence although personally helpless in such present matters, he can at least work patiently to improve future ones by working to improve future humanity. He will seek to find a sensible balance between the good manners of attending to his own spiritual business and the compassionate duty of making his knowledge and experience available to others.
-- Notebooks Category 20: What Is Philosophy? > Chapter 4 : Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > # 266
