The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes

So powerful is this angst that no amount of wealth or earthly power and comfort is a shield against it. This is even true, Pascal argues, for kings. It seems the king’s mind should be at ease, for unlike nearly everyone else in the kingdom, the king is not required to engage in brutal toil for his own subsistence. And yet that is its own kind of prison: “When we imagine a king attended with every pleasure he can feel, if he be without diversion, and be left to consider and reflect on what he is, this feeble happiness will not sustain him,” Pascal writes. “He will necessarily fall into forebodings of dangers, of revolutions which may happen, and, finally, of death and inevitable disease; so that if he be without what is called diversion, he is unhappy, and more unhappy than the least of his subjects who plays and diverts himself.”[5]