Harold Bloom in The Western Canon calls the Pensées “a bad case of indigestion” in regard to Montaigne. But, in copying Montaigne, Pascal also changed him. Even where he used Montaigne’s words, he set them in a different light. Like Jorge Luis Borges’s twentieth-century character Pierre Menard, who writes a novel which happens to be identical to Don Quixote, Pascal wrote the same words in a different era and with a different temperament, and thus created something new. It is the emotional difference that counts. Montaigne and Pascal had similar insights into the less flattering sides of human
...more
