Pascal’s lifelong task became an exercise of endlessly reducing words to their essence, in order to probe a pure nothingness and bring us to its edge. For him, allfinite things are fragments, for they are nothing but pieces torn from infinity. All the same, the nature of finitude is such that not even a vast quantity of fragmentscould ever approach wholeness, ‘a unit added to infinity does not increase infinity at all, any more than a foot added to an infinite length’.