Essential McLuhan 294 nature of things they had to carry their learning with them. Fewness of manuscripts and difficulty of access made for utterly different habits of mind with regard to what was written. One result was encyclopedism. Men of learning tried, at least, to learn everything. So that if learning was oral, teaching was even more so. Solitary learning and study came only with the printed page. And today when learning and study are switching more and more to the seminar, the round-table and the discussion group, we have to note these developments as due to the decline of the printed page as the dominant art form. The manuscript page was a very flexible affair. It was not only in close rapport with the oral speech but with plastic design and colour illustration. So the ornate examples of manuscript art easily rival and resemble those books in stone and glass, the cathedrals and abbeys. In our own time James Joyce, seeking a means to orchestrate and control the various verbi- voco-visual media of our own age, resorted to the page format of the Book of Kells as a means thereto. And even the early romantic poets, painters and novelists expressed their preference for gothic in terms of rebellion against book culture. Recently Rosamund Tuve, in elucidating the art of George Herbert, discovered that the characteristic effects of metaphysical wit in the 17th century poetry resulted from the translation of visual effects from medieval manuscript and woodcut into the more abstract form of the printed word. If the 17th century was receding from a visual, plastic culture towards an abstract literary culture, today we seem to be receding from an abstract book culture towards a highly sensuous, plastic pictorial culture. Recent poets have used simultaneously effects from both extremes to achieve witty results not unlike those of the 17th century. The impact of Mr. Eliot’s very first lines of poetry has been felt everywhere: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table. It is the overlayering of perspectives, the simultaneous use of two kinds of space which creates the shock of dislocation here. For if all art is a contrived trap for the attention, all art and all language are techniques for looking at one situation through another one. The printed page is a 16th century art form which obliterated two thousand years of manuscript culture in a few decades. Yet it is hard for us to see the printed page or any other current medium except in contrast to some other form. The mechanical clock, for example, created a wholly artificial image of time as a uniform linear structure. This artificial form gradually changed habits of work, feeling and thought which are only being rejected today. We know that in our own lives each event exists in its own time. Time is not the same for the speaker as for the audience. To