Pascal Thoughts

Blaise Pascal's Pensées are currently on my mind and one seemed particularly appropriate to a recent situation. Last Friday, I picked up a picture of my mother's that she had always hung in her standard height, ten foot tall, apartments here in New York City. As it was a life size portrait, it rather dominated the room. I remember it therefore as being large, looming, impossible to ignore. It was leaning against the garage door when I arrived and in comparison seemed small. Once hung in the loft studio to which it was taken it seemed even smaller next to the careful canvases of the painter whose studio it is.

French School, Portrait of Blaise Pascal, at Versailles (and also adorning my Penguin Classics edition)

Pascal is discussing the delicate point in time at which one can edit well, too close and one has no view of the matter, too far and one can not pick up the gist of it, when he says: "It is like looking at pictures which are too near or too far away. There is just one indivisible point which is the right place." (#21) Good grief can you imagine the museum jostling if that were true? But he goes on, "Others are too near, too far, too high, or too low. In painting the rules of perspective decide it, but how will it be decided when it comes to truth and morality?" Oh my, "decide it". Decide what? And do the rules of perspective truly indicate only one acceptable point at which to view a picture? What is this right place? I get papers with such reasoning from my students occasionally and would forgive them if they would reference Pascal as their stylistic ancestor, but they don't and I am not overly convinced by Pascal just on his own merit either. I am trying though.

Later (#41) he says "Two infinities, mean. When we read too fast or too slowly we understand nothing." Convenient excuse, if I ever saw one, for putting the blame on the reader who might be bewildered by his analogy between the well made heel of a shoe or the courage of a soldier and one's chosen career. (#35)

I have visions of a man wearing fancy heels, holding a rifle in a 17th century picture gallery declaiming sceptically. It certainly makes reading Pascal more fun.


**All quotes taken from the Penguin edition with translations by A.J. Krailsheimer