To define is to kill. To suggest is to create. - Stéphane Mallarmé

Magical shadow with symbolic powers! A voice from the distant past, an evocation, Is it not mine prepared for incantation?

The scene illustrates but the idea, not any actual action, in a hymen (out of which flows Dream), tainted with vice [vicieux] yet sacred, between desire and fulfillment, perpetration and remembrance: here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past, under the false appearance of a present [apparence fausse de présent]. That is how the Mime operates, whose act is confined to a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice or the mirror [sans briser la glace]; he thus sets up a medium [milieu], a pure medium, of fiction.

How, save through obscure Terrors, imagine more implacable still And as a suppliant the god who some day will Receive the gift of your grace! and for whom, Devoured by anguish, do you keep the unknown Splendor and mystery of your being?