Today the distance is not far. It is near. It is walkable, domestic. In fact, it is in our homes, on our computer monitors, on our cell phone screens. Because the technique of our time is the technique of the distant: the ancient Greek adverb téle -distant- is part of the elements and instruments of contemporary technique. Everything that is far away -islands, deserts, events, customs- comes to us, becomes surface, screen, sound. It is the task of language - even the language that is proper to technique - not to reduce the thickness of remoteness, the richness of its variants, the depth of its time and space. Literature, narrative, poetry, the arts, contribute to keeping open the space of remoteness. Because they represent remoteness as remoteness, and demand the imaginative and meditative collaboration of the reader, of the spectator.

This is precisely the space that the author questions here in its representations: the goodbye, on whose threshold is already present remoteness, the poetics of the horizon, the representations of the sky, the forms of nostalgia and exile, the questions of art about how to paint remoteness, the fantastic cartography, seeing from afar, the sound of remoteness, the love of a distant land and, finally, the journey, in the company of the poets to the subterranean world of shadows. All these chapters can be read both as a critique of ‘telematic reason’ and as a passionate and inventive defense of literature, its knowledge and its forms.