Diversion (divertissement)

Pascal's diagnosis of why a human being finds it so hard to sit alone in a quiet room. He notices a strange thing: a king who has everything will grow more bored without his hunt, his cards, his court bustle than the least of his subjects. The cause lies deeper than any lack of amusements – it is what amusement keeps a person from seeing. Strip away the noise and he is left alone with his condition: mortal, fragile, thrown into the silence of the infinite spaces that terrified Pascal, unsure where he came from or where he goes. The thought is unbearable, and so he flees. He throws himself into business, into wars, into honours, into gambling, into an endless traffic of small errands, and the motion turns him away from himself. The hare the hunter chases is of no real use to him; the chase itself is the thing he wants, because it screens off the thought of death. Pascal calls this divertissement, diversion, and sees in it less a mere sin of idleness than the way a whole civilisation is arranged so that a person never stops and looks the truth in the face. His deepest claim is that this flight is also a proof of greatness: only a creature that dimly hears it was made for something larger than the fuss it drowns in could flee so desperately. Our age, with its unbroken stream of news and spectacle, has perfected diversion beyond anything Pascal could imagine, and made exactly that much quieter the thought it rescues us from.