The Symbolists long ago, and Yeats, Joyce, Pound, Eliot in this century, spent their entire lives expounding the aesthetics of the resonant intervals of acoustic space. The same resonant intervals have become the basis of modern quantum mechanics. The major factor is that the interval is where the action is. Whereas visual space is continuous, uniform, connected and static, the spaces created by all the other senses arc discontinuous and dynamic. At the speed of light the simultaneous information that now enmeshes the human organisms of the planet easily dominates and erodes all visual culture with its rational bias for the connected.
Letter to Barbara Ward, February 9, 1973, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 466
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Interval
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan