Blaise Pascal died at thirty-nine, leaving behind fragments for an apology for the Christian religion he never completed. His editors arranged them into a book that became one of the foundational texts of French literature. The wager argument is here, but so is much else: terrifying meditations on infinity, on human misery, on the abyss that opens when amusement ceases. The prose style is epigrammatic, the thinking feverish. Pascal was a mathematician, a scientist, a mystic, and his fragments carry the urgency of a man who knew he was running out of time.