Pensées
Pensées — bound from fragments
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
A bundle of paper strips on a loop of string. You chose which ones.
- Catch rate
- Not found in the wild
- Base research
- 210
- Stat total
- 300
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Bound from scraps, and it shows. Pascal never finished the book — he died at thirty-nine with the apology for the Christian religion still in pieces, and what you are carrying is as much of it as you gathered. Low Stamina, and honestly so.
Very high Contend. Almost every fragment is an argument already cocked — he wrote in aphorisms because he meant them to land before the reader could set up a defence.
Modest Defend. Fragments can be quoted against each other and often are; the book cannot close ranks the way a finished treatise can.
Enormous Popularity. Pascal is the most quotable apologist who ever lived, and half the sentences in here are ones people repeat without knowing whose they are.
Cited for this book
Pascal wrote on large sheets, cut them into strips, and threaded the strips onto string in bundles — liasses. He died before arranging them into the book he intended. His family found roughly a thousand scraps, some still threaded, and editors have argued about the order ever since. Every printed Pensées is somebody’s guess at a book its author never assembled.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
This book learns nothing new by levelling — everything it knows, it knew from the start or brought with it through development.