Divertissement
divertere (latin)
At Pascal’s, the diversion by which man tears himself away from the sight of his own condition. The word does not refer to mere leisure but to a precise operation: everything that occupies and agitates—games, the hunt, war, office, even the most serious affairs—inasmuch as it turns us elsewhere and keeps us from thinking of ourselves. Its driving force is not the object pursued (*“we would not want it if it were offered”*) but the distraction that diverts. Diversion is thus a veil drawn over the void, misery, and death, which man cannot bear to face directly.
tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre
The word comes from the Latin divertere, “to turn away,” “to avert one’s gaze.” Everyday language has softened it into a synonym for pleasure and amusement; Pascal restores its original force. To divert is not to delight, but to deflect—to draw the gaze away from what it refuses to see. Under this single term, he groups behaviors that seem worlds apart: games and war, conversation and statecraft, hunting and study. What unites them is not their object but their function: to prevent man from remaining alone with himself, where the thought of his wretchedness and mortality awaits him.
Hence the paradox Pascal exposes: we do not seek the catch but the chase, not the gain but the motion that distracts from it. Even the king is surrounded by people whose role is to keep him from thinking about himself. Diversion, then, is not a vice grafted onto human nature—it is the spontaneous response of a “weak and mortal condition” to the unbearable prospect of stillness, where man “feels his nothingness, his abandonment, his inadequacy.”
It must be distinguished from its neighbors. Acedia is endured—a disgust that drives one from a place—while diversion is cherished: we rush toward it, we pay dearly for it. The Stoics’ occupatio names the busyness that steals time; Pascalian diversion digs deeper, down to the void that busyness conceals. And it does not oppose leisure, but confrontation: a rest filled with distractions remains diversion; only bare rest, what monks call hesychia, forces man to face what he flees.