Fragments arranged like the ruins of a cathedral never completed, each cut with the precision of a geometer who has turned his instruments upon the soul. Blaise Pascal was dying when he pinned these notes to scraps of paper in bundles tied with string, and when they were published posthumously in 1670 they became one of the most unsettling documents in Western thought. He had been a mathematical prodigy, an inventor, a physicist, before a night of fire in 1654 converted him utterly. The Pensées were meant to become an apology for Christianity, but their unfinished state makes them something stranger: a mind arguing with itself at the edge of the abyss. The famous wager is here, but so is the silence of infinite spaces, and a God who hides.