Essential McLuhan 202 We begin again to structure the primordial feelings and emotions from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. Counterblast, 1954 POETIC IMAGERY ONLY a part of an author’s imagery comes from his reading. It comes from the whole of his sensitive life since early childhood. Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others?… What I call the “auditory imagination” is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality. T.S.ELIOT (From The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933) THE WORLD OF We take paper for granted.