The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

This fragment is one of the shortest in the Pensées: a single, isolated sentence. In the classic edition it follows a meditation in which Pascal considers “the short span” of his life, “swallowed up in the eternity before and after”, and the little space he occupies, “engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not”. Straight after come other questions: “How many kingdoms know nothing of us!”, and why are my knowledge and my span of life thus bounded?

Pascal, a scientist who had experimented on the vacuum and laid the foundations of probability theory, was writing when the new astronomy was enlarging the universe beyond measure. The silence of the spaces is no longer the Ancients’ music of the spheres: it is a sky that does not answer.

The Pensées, notes for an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, appeared in 1670, eight years after Pascal’s death. Who is speaking here is still debated: Pascal himself, or the unbeliever he wants to lead to God. The sentence has become the very expression of man’s vertigo before the cosmos.

Pensées, 1670

Original text checked word for word in the work; the translation is by quotesay.

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