The first proposition I shall comment upon is the shortest one. It is a poetic statement in four words: four French words ‘Séparés, on est ensemble’ that I will translate as follows: ‘Apart, we are together’. This statement is quoted from a prose-poem by Mallarmé ‘The White Water lily’. I will remind you what the poem is about. The poet makes a small boat trip on the river in order to see a lady who is supposed to stay somewhere along the river in the neighbourhood; as he gets close to the place where he believes that she stays, he hears a light noise of footsteps that might be the sign of the presence of the invisible lady; after having enjoyed that proximity, the poet decides to keep the mystery of the lady and the secret of their being-together unviolated by silently moving back without seeing her and being seen by her. The poem was first published in a magazine entitled Art and Fashion. So it is easy to blame the paradox of the ‘being together apart’ on the sophisticated attitude of the poet in search of both metaphysical purity and refined sensations. That easy attitude has to ignore two things: first the solitude of the being together was put at the same time on two large canvasses that were to pass on as paradigms of modern painting, I mean Seurat’s Grande Jatte and Bathing in Asnières, two pictures which allegedly have been conceived of as modern transpositions of the Athenian frieze of the Panathenaia. Second the poet himself stressed that the crisis of the verse was part of an ‘ideal crisis’ which, he said, was itself dependent on a ‘social crisis’. This suggests that the very form of the prose-poem may have some kind of relation with the painterly conjunction of high art and popular leisure, some kind of relation , I would add, that might be itself a ‘distant’ relation, just as the relation of the silent boater with the invisible lady.