Issue 17: Facing the Abyss: Pascal, Silence, and Photography

Pascal, Silence, and the Mask

Pascal’s genius lay not only in his scientific discoveries, but in the candor with which he faced the fragility of human existence. For him, misery was not an accident, but the condition that defined us. Most people, he said, cannot bear to think of their own weaknesses. They flee into distractions, diversions, entertainments, pursuits that keep them from the unbearable clarity of stillness.

Most activities, after all, can become masks — a way of hiding misery from the self, and ultimately a way of preventing thought. Thinking, for Pascal, was both the most noble act and the most dangerous: it isolates, it wounds, it exposes the abyss. To refuse it is to refuse life itself; yet to pursue it too far is to risk despair. His answer was faith as the frame within which thought could surrender.

Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, composed in a German prisoner-of-war camp, makes this tension audible. Critics describe it as an apocalyptic yet transcendent masterpiece, born amid brutality, yet suffused with spiritual calm. More than lament, the work is seen as a “prayer for humanity, trembling with the full knowledge of all the ravages humanity has produced”. In that sound, faith and silence collide — despair transmutes into form, suffering finds its rhythm. Messiaen, like Pascal, accepted the abyss and gave it beauty, binding agony to awe in a single breath.

Pascal’s severity still leaves me restless. For him, most human activity dissolves into diversion, a flight from misery. Yet I cannot accept that every gesture belongs to escape. There are movements that do not conceal thought but make it possible: the discipline of shaping a goal, the persistence of building slowly, the risk of stepping forward when paralysis tempts you to stillness. These are not masks but vessels. They carry misery without denying it, transforming it into something lived and faced. If diversion is flight, then this kind of action is resistance — not a refusal of misery, but a way of giving it form.

Silence is where this resistance often begins. The silence of a room, the silence after a note has faded, the silence of a photograph. These are not voids but conditions — frames in which the world is forced to show itself without ornament. Silence strips away the masks, and with them the distractions that make life bearable but thin. What remains is raw, difficult, yet also clarifying. Pascal sought that silence through faith; Messiaen inscribed it in music; in photography, it takes shape as stillness.

The shutter does not simply freeze an instant; it suspends the noise of life long enough for thought to emerge. The image is silence given form. It reveals rather than erases. Like Pascal’s wager, every photograph is a bet that the pause will matter, that something within the stillness will speak.