It makes for exciting reading, but after a few pages one craves a dose of Montaigne’s easygoing humanism. Pascal wants people to remain aware of ultimate things: the huge empty spaces, God, death. Yet few of us find it possible to maintain such thoughts for long. We get distracted; the mind drifts back to concrete and personal matters. Pascal found this infuriating: ‘what does the world think about?46 Never about that! But about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring …’ Montaigne liked asking big questions too, but he preferred to explore life through his
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