“The greatness of a man is that he can know he is wretched. A tree does not know it is wretched. True wretchedness is knowing that one is wretched, but it is greatness too knowing that one is wretched. This wretchedness itself proves human greatness, for it is the wretchedness of a great lord, or a deposed king…”

I vomited, there on the threshold. Beautiful and terrible Pascal, the darkest author I have ever read, darker than Calvin, Kafka, the black friar Savonarola, darker even than you, Master Thomas, for all your warring brutes. You never tried to intentionally make your reader wretched, nor pried his eyelids back and forced him to gaze into the Great Dark. Some acts are too cruel, reader, even for philosophers. If William of Ockham’s art we dub a razor, and if Nietzsche subtitled his Twilight of the Idols “How to Philosophize with a Hammer,” then Pascal’s is surely a flaying knife, petal-thin and cruel, that peels the victim’s skin back inch by inch, leaving no shield between the tender soul and the infinite dark mirror. And he does more, Pascal, he bares our race’s flaws as well, civilization’s cowardly underbelly. Pascal’s French is unsurpassed in elegance, his logic flawless, his message likely true, and his goal nothing less than the perfection and salvation of his reader, but—remember who it is that says this, reader—he is too cruel. Yes, I have read him. I learned from him that all the activities of my life, all my duty, my penitence, my love, all these are mere diversions to distract me from thinking about the only certainty: someday I will die. We all will. All human achievement, our empires, good deeds, art, the Great Project itself, all are distractions, invented by a race so weak we cannot sit still in a chair for five minutes and face our finitude. What is Caesar but a man so rich in power that he can afford to be distracted every instant of every day? A king in office is fortunate in his distraction, but a deposed king has nothing to distract him from the lesson that even kingship is one more game invented by a race that will never grow out of fearing the dark. Yes, when I read Pascal, I fled. I admit it. I am a coward, and I do indeed use duty to hide from my fear, my guilt, my wretched human state. And now, before my eyes, our fragile, straining Carlyle, a prisoner with no means of escape, endures the lashing of philosophy’s cruelest words… surely, reader, no philosopher in history has ever had a truer apprentice than had the Marquis de Sade in Dominic Seneschal.

Dominic inhaled the salt perfume of sweat and acid, my vomit the first to christen his new cell.