no longer on the scene. For the supereminent role of the first 
cause we find substituted the play of second causes. In place 
of God there are feelings, sensations, and whatever causes 
sensations.” Well, what causes sensations such as the above is 
unmistakably print technology with its power like Lear’s “darker 
purpose” to divide the little kingdom of man into a batch of 
jarring atoms, and uniformly homogenized components. 
Existence becomes, then, not being  but only “flux, shadow, and 
perpetual variation”; “I do not depict being,” says Montaigne; “I 
depict passage.” Nothing could be more cinematic than that. 
Renouncing the depiction of what is favor of an illusion 
achieved by a sequence of static “shots”—this is typography in  
extenso . Let us recall King Lear  as a live model of the stripping 
of human institutions, and consciousness itself, by the 
progressive isolation of the senses. Parallel to this 
psychological experiment in our time is the deprivation of sense