the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end.”

The notion reinforced McLuhan’s early perception that language was a living bond between the past and the present, and a boundless storehouse of perception. Years later, in the era of moon landings, he remarked that a single word of the English language was more interesting than the entire NASA space program. Eliot’s notion also may have provided him with a hint later developed in his media studies. McLuhan held to the medieval notion of the senses as a kind of collective working to recreate reality in the mind. If one sense predominated, that skewed the results. If hearing dominated, for example—as in the “auditory imagination”—then the mind perceived reality much differently than if, say, the sense of sight was