The ways upward and downward are the same. Both of these arc spoken from the world of acoustic space in which there is no private identity, nor any upside-down. Yet they sound paradoxical to a literate or visually oriented person. Nobody could have been more literate than Eliot, and yet nobody could have had more empathy, for the non-visual world of the preliterate. Probably, by comparison with the intense literacy of the print-accustomed man.