“Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we are wholly changed: we are no longer the same.”Blaise Pascal · Cugetări · 1670 · fragmentul 87 (Brunschvicg) / 82 (Lafuma)
Time doesn't heal the wound; it replaces the person who felt it.
Pascal does not see the passage of time as a medicine but as a replacement of the subject. Pain stays on record in the memory that belongs to us, yet that memory always belongs to someone who is changing. Whoever we were a year ago no longer fully exists: our desires, habits, even the way we remember have shifted. A divorce that once seemed unbearable becomes, years later, a story we tell with detachment, because the one living it is no longer the one who was hurt. Healing is really a kind of disappearance.
Pascal implies something less comfortable: if the suffering self disappears, then decisions made in the middle of pain belong to that same vanishing person. A gesture made in anger, a letter sent during a quarrel, a promise to cut someone off — all signed by a version that is melting away. Picture blocking someone in a fit of rage, and months later the same hand wonders why it did it. The wound was never resolved; only its author changed. So the question becomes: what deserves to be postponed until someone calmer takes our place?
Why it matters It helps someone stuck in an old grievance understand that waiting is itself an action: tomorrow's version of them will hurt less.