holding his seminars, until suffering a disabling stroke in September, 1979. The man who lived for talking and communicating now could only utter a few phrases. In 1980, the university, hard pressed for funds, closed down the Centre. McLuhan showed up at the Centre one evening and wept to see his old office in shambles. He could do nothing, however, to reclaim his old life, and his ordeal continued until, sometime early in the morning of December 31, 1980, he died in bed, at his Toronto home.
Although references to McLuhan seemed few and far between in the years immediately following his death, his students remembered vividly the man who regarded it as his job to wake them up. Most people, he felt, went through life in a somnambulistic state. If he managed to waken one student a year from this state, he felt he was
