Ophelia de Vere

  Blaise Pascal was not a man to concern himself with missed WhatsApp messages. Writing in seventeenth-century France, the mathematician and philosopher was preoccupied with rather more formidable questions: the existence of God, the frailty of human existence and our extraordinary talent for avoiding uncomfortable truths. Yet, one of his observations in the Pensées seems almost suspiciously prescient. Much of human unhappiness, he suggested, arises from our inability to remain quietly in a room.  Nearly four centuries later, we have perfected an astonishing number of ways to avoid doing precisely that.  We carry entire libraries in our pockets: the collected opinions of strangers, photographs of other people's holidays, breaking news from countries we may not even be able to locate on a map, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of videos of animals behaving in ways their owners find amusing. Never before has it been so easy to escape the inconvenience of one's own thoug...