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Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego ….
The idea that a human life is like a book is deeply embedded in Western culture. It appears in its early form as the sacred Book of Life—the master narrative of all humanity—and finds its first fully modern individual expression in Rousseau's Confessions. This tradition is not lost on the historian John R. Cole, author of Pascal:
The Man and His Two Loves. In introducing his biographical study of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), one of Rousseau's crucial literary progenitors, he evokes the correspondence between a life and a text by noting how extensively “we make and remake the great book of the Pascal whom we all love and admire” (p. 2). To fashion his own Pascal, the first text Cole sets out to emend is Vie de Monsieur Pascal, written by Pascal's sister, Gilberte Périer, shortly after his death. This “canonical conception” of his life, which is guided by Gilberte's Jansenist fervor, plots the story as “Youthful Genius, Midlife Conversion, Mature Saintliness.” Cole's revision of Gilberte's plot yields a darker one: “Youthful Attachments, Separations and Losses, Mature Depression.” As Cole points out, his new edition of Pascal's life bears traces of the version promulgated by Voltaire and Condorcet, who saw the awesome intellect overshadowed by religious scruple, the philosophical vision blurred by the “pathological melancholy.” At the same time, Cole notes that their version—though a corrective to Gilberte's text—must be held suspect as well, for it is filtered through an Enlightenment ideology hostile to the Catholicism of Pascal. “Their attempts to discuss his last years and later writings as those of a ‘madman,’” Cole argues, “reflect the biases of their own rationalist philosophy, not the findings of an empirical psychology or a modern psychiatry” (p. 5).
But if the Voltairean edition of Pascal's life is corrupted, so too is the Jansenist, which, far from writing Pascal off as a mad