Blaise Pascal would have found the Coronavirus fascinating.

The line of his that people keep quoting is his claim that "all man's unhappiness results from his inability to sit quietly in his own room." It sounds like a call for contentment in the midst of lockdown. (1/7)

But Pascal's reason for saying this is much more interesting than that. If we sit quietly in our own room, Pascal argues, without any distraction or entertainment, we worry about death. We are confronted with the reality of mortality. So we do everything we can to avoid it.

We pursue distraction at all costs. (The person with most access to the king of France, other than his family, is the fool: the one whose job it is to prevent him from thinking about death.) We pay people - actors, sportspeople, comedians - to take our thoughts to other things.

But the current crisis, and especially the lockdown, has led to the almost immediate irrelevance of celebrities: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/07/coronavirus-celebrity-influence-criticism We are still watching Netflix, but our normal ways of avoiding the thought of death, from the Premiership to the West End, are not working.

Yet this doesn't mean we are happy to think about death after all. We have simply changed our strategy - enforced by the lockdown (and temporarily?) - from *distraction* from death (Hollywood, sport) to *deliverance* from it (clap the NHS, following The Science).

Which is why people are suddenly wondering why sports stars get paid so much and nurses so little (even though it's always been true), and why we're seeing all those op-eds about how Corona has revealed who the genuinely essential workers are.

Pascal, I suspect, would say that our desire to be distracted from death will always lead us, in the end, to pay "fools" much more than we pay nurses. More than that, though, he would have fascinating things to say about a world now sitting quietly in their own rooms. (7/7)