It was made painfully clear in the media how he 
dealt with the wedding of his daughter as a family 
man. Or how his brother described Marshall as 
being completely out of it. He was the proverbial 
idiot-savant. His head was elsewhere. That is a 
function of personality. It has to be.

I only knew McLuhan after the operation. Some 
people say he was brighter before, but I think what 
they are really saying is that he was more normal 
before, he was more multi-levelled. Not that he was 
uni-dimensional, he was uni-level. Marshall was 
really always on a very high plane. Just the way he 
would treat any occurrence: an invitation, a