Most Fragile Thing

“Between us and heaven or hell there is only life half-way, the most fragile thing in the world.”

This is a breathtaking reflection on how delicate life truly is. Whether there is a heaven, a hell, or just the empty vacuum of space, it stands to reason that my life is a brittle, insignificant speck somewhere in its midst. At any moment, this life could splinter into a million undetectable, unrecognizable pieces. That’s how I feel when I consider religion, cosmology, and even human history. Each exerts its influence, pushes, squeezes, and squashes me; so far, I remain intact.

I borrowed this quote from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées. Pascal was a brilliant mathematician and physicist who became deeply religious late in life and abandoned most of his scientific research. I think he was most famous for “Pascal’s Wager” in which he argues that it’s irrational to bet against his faith since it promises an infinite reward (salvation) in exchange for risking something finite (life). In probably theory, the expected return of such a wager is also infinite which is a fancy way of saying that the risk is nil. (An aside: I took a seminar called “Thinking about Infinity” in which I refuted this argument in an essay. In essence, I claimed that life was not finite but infinitesimal and therefore the expected return of this wager is ambiguous and can be anything between zero and infinity.)

s.d.