At the Speed of Light There is Only Illumination: A Reappraisal of Marshall McLuhan

A Move to the Glebe

A Move to the Glebe JOHN MOSS I STOPPED READING BOOKS WHEN I TURNED FIFTY. Under the aegis of Marshall McLuhan, I determined that the impact of print on my life was antithetical to living well. Not being a zealot, I have not given up reading in dailies or weeklies the captions under photo­ graphs, or print on signs or cereal boxes, or printed texts emblazoned on screens; nor, when I made the conversion from print to experience, did I consign my library to a ceremonial pyre. I am neither a fanatic nor given to grandiloquent gestures. Instead, I boxed up the vast collection of leatherbound books I had acquired as an avid bibliophile and all the paperback books I had accumulated over the years as a literary academic, and donated them to the Salvation Army. Having done that, I bought a small house in the Glebe and moved out of my capacious condominium with its spectacular view across one whole wall of the Gatineau Hills. I work out in a gym off Bank Street, and in the evenings I watch television. I have not read a book in ten years now and find that my teaching has improved, I am in excellent condition, and I know what is going on in the world. Of course, I often listen to radio. Anyone who has lived alone in this country knows the CBC asa surrogate family. When Barbara Frurn died, I was devastated. Gzowskis retirement took over a year to assimilate, al­ though Michael Enright s shift from "As It Happens" to the morning slot helped ease the anxiety. "Quirks and Quarks" is my science and "The House" is my politics. Understand this, if you are not familiar with Canadian things: I no more feel bound to explain these allusions than you would to explain why your sister has a strange physiognomy or your grandfather was shot for desertion. Some things are simply authentic and must be accepted. No one has noticed my eccentricity—and I regard it as such, for everyone in my field of endeavour is surrounded by books, fortified from the actual world by a palisade of books, inured from experience in a garrison of books. I walk through bookstores now and am amazed at all the people. In the giant stores they swarm like inversions of bees, taking away from the honeycombed cells their vital nutrition, to read in isolation, each reader on his or her own. Circulars come through the mailadvertising all manner of book clubs. People give books as gifts, decorate their homes with books, and impress their friends with table­top tomes too big to stand upright in cases manufacturedfor the average­sizedvolume. Books are as ubiquitous as air, yet no one notices that I do not read. Giving up books isnot something I would recommend to a younger person. My reasons for sayingso bring me back to McLuhan. Bookswere important to me asa child. I grewup in an orphanage and did not discover until my mid­twenties that I was not a foundling. My parents decided while still a young couple to sail around the world; a baby, weaned and unwieldy as I was when they left, was a dangerous encumbrance. At some sacrifice they gave me up for adoption, leaving me in the care of The Church. Since in Quebec at the time the birth ratewasstill so high as to be considered a progenerative act of God, and I had neither blue eyes nor blond hair and was circumcised, there were no takers. I spent my early years free of familial impositions. Only by the strangest of circumstances did I eventually discover that my parents werealive and living onVancouver Island with my two brothers and two sisters who, being significantly younger than me, still lived at home. We have encountered a problem, here, inherent in the narrative text: print occupies time. I set out in the previous paragraphs to relate my life without books to Marshall McLuhan. If I had been telling my story to the ear not the eye, the medium of our discourse would be air­sound waves, which at close quarters arevirtuallyinstantaneous. Or personalities; the medium of my story would be the interface of our separate lives, the 8 8 sustained contemporaneity of our common experience. To imitate the immediacy of speech, I write this text as if it were written in the perpetual present. The illusion...