Writing in bed: I have always loved Edith Wharton's habit of doing just that, as well as Cynthia Ozick's discussion of it (look how neat the desk at which Wharton is photographed in her stays; imagine how much more comfortable she is in bed with her stays undone). I remember learning, during my first studies of philosophy at Bryn Mawr, that René Descartes wrote in bed, by the heat of a stove supplied by Queen Christina, to say nothing of Winston Churchill's similar custom.

Arthur Danto's meditation, in his “Works of Art and Mere Real Things,” on a square of red paint and its various possible readings serves as a warning about multiple interpretations. This painting might be a story of the Egyptians and the Red Sea, after the Israelites crossed over. Or, then, a work by a Danish portraitist, labeled “Kierkegaard's Mood.” Or, then, one by a politically active painter, “Red Square.” Or by a disciple of Henri Matisse, “Red Table Cloth”—in this one, the paint would be more thickly applied. In my view, the most appropriate state we can muster is what the surrealists called “availability” (disponibilité)—openness to whatever might, of a sudden, happen in our understanding to achieve a presentness of perception, even as we note the clear risk of boundary crossings between the arts.

With “Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard,” of 1897 (“Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance”)—a meditation on how to set up a mental dice game that would visually inscribe the fatal play of human thought shipwrecked against unbeatable chance—Stéphane Mallarmé announced modernism. As his celebrated white sonnet about a swan stuck in the glacier of the blank page (“The new, lively, and lovely today”) had established the image of writing as a near-to-death experience, his equally celebrated understatement about how the ultimate presence of the rose depends on its absence “from any bouquet” had set up symbolism as the art of suggestion. Had any French poet ever had such influence on writers to come? such resonance for readers and artists? With Mallarmé modern poetry begins.

Dramatic, even melodramatic, Ruskin's preferred style is often—and deliberately—given over to the passionate; in the middle of a lecture, he will stop to announce that he has found by his side a “violent little fragment of an undelivered lecture” (QA, 157) which he then delivers, subsequently pointing out his return to “cool English” (QA, 160). Such a self-conscious examination and description of his own mood and tone characterizes Ruskin's odd discursive stance, as he is at once involved and distant, choosing his drama in his written text, and then orally exposing it.

The proceedings somehow opened. The talking and laughing and shuffling suddenly subsided … a figure rose; she took her way from among us; she mounted a platform; she spoke for precisely five minutes; she descended. Directly she sat down another rose; mounted the platform; spoke for precisely five minutes and descended; then a third rose; then a fourth—and so it went on, speaker following speaker, one from the right, one from the left, one from the middle, one from the background—each took her way to the stand, said what she had to say, and gave place to her successor. … They were like marksmen, I thought, standing up in turn with rifle raised to aim at a target. Sometimes they missed, and there was a roar of laughter; sometimes they hit, and there was a roar of applause. (Woolf 229)