DISTRACTION IS THE MUSE OF THE POOR

Every one knows that the sight of cats or rats, the crushing of a coal, etc., may unhinge the reason.
The tone of voice affects the wisest, and changes the force of a discourse or a poem.
- Blaise Pascal

Pacal's Pensées was a book published originally in 1660. In this translation, the book “exists” in my computer as a countable string of text. Its physical meassurements, if there is such a thing for digital content are as follows:      

146 printed pages (A4)
    5,675 paragraphes
  65,057 words
277,215 letters (no spaces)
339,465 letters (including spaces)

The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it....It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.
- Blaise Pascal

Necessity of Entertainment - Distraction is the muse of the poor. A winter evening in France can be romantic yet wet and miserable in a uniquely Gallic way. You can reached the pitch of bordom so extreme that either you to get something new to read or go clinical. But on Sunday in France there is no Barnes and Noble, no tv, no radio but yes Virginia there is an internet connection. A text copy of Pascal’s Pensées translated into English by one W. F. Trotter on the Guttenberg project website slowly downloads onto your powerbook. Why download it rather than Candide? Or the Further Adventures of Sherlock Homes? Pensées de Pascal is not light reading, especially if you are looking to read to avoid thinking. But I did and I downloaded and then I read. After reaching section 22, there was a motive. By section 34, there was a glimmer of a plan and by section 72, there was project waiting. Which is fortunate because no distraction is more entertaining than work.

348. A thinking reed.- It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
- Blaise Pascal

Desire - We all have the urge to celebrate our own private Paris. Mine, like every Paris(s) is a city of pleasure. The irresistible decadant pleasure of thinking. In Paris thinking itself is my chief interest- a sensual metapursuit. It is a solitary amusement, although I often overindulge in the company of others.

372. In writing down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my weakness, that I constantly forget. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought; for I strive only to know my nothingness.

-Blaise Pascal

Whimsy as a unit of measure - To cut up a book is to pantomime reading it: For what happens to the neat linear string of letter, word, phases, sentences, paragraphes and chapters of a book once read? All you read scatters like wet leaves in the damp autumn wind of the brain. Some word are stick together. Some are lost completely. No matter what you do; rake that book into neat mental piles or leave it to be forgotten entirely, it will never be that neat string again. Rereading reminds or reastonishes or rebores. Nothing can put that book back together again. Not even the fiercest memorization can protect the shortest of paragraphes from our neurochemistry. There is only the quantum particulate of the mind: chance whimsy and charm....

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.
- Blaise Pascal