A McLuhan sourcebook 279 French is the “language of love” just because it unites voice and ear in an especially close way, as does the telephone. So it is quite natural to kiss via phone, but not easy to visualize while phoning.—1964 The child and the teenager understand the telephone, embracing the cord and the ear-mike as if they were beloved pets.—1964 THE TYPEWRITER The rhythms of typing favour short, concise sentences, sentences with oral form.—1974 The typewriter is part of our oral revolution.—1974 A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.— 1974 At the typewriter, the poet commands the resources of the printing press. The machine is like a public address system immediately in hand.— 1964 The typewriter fuses composition and publication, causing an entirely new attitude to the written and printed word. Composing on the typewriter has altered the forms of the language and literature.—1974 MOVIES The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure.—1964 The basic fact to keep in mind about the movie camera and projector is their resemblance to the process of human cognition.—1954 Film is still in its Manuscript phase. —1964 When an inexpensive play-back for video tape is available, the film will become as portable as a book after Gutenberg.—1966 Every literary form, from the stream of consciousnessness to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, to the private eye in the whodunit, is a direct import of film technique. One of the principal effects of new art forms is to awaken older forms to new life and manifestation.—1964 I can only regard the movie as the mechanization and distortion of this cognitive miracle by which we recreate the exterior world. But whereas cognition provides that dance of the intellect which is the analogical sense of Being, the mechanical medium has tended to provide merely a dream world which is a substitute for reality rather than a means of proving reality. —1954 The movie camera is a means of rolling up the daylight world on a spool. It does this by rapid still shots. The movie projector unrolls the spool and recreates the daylight world as a dark dream world. In reversing the process of perception even the mechanical camera and projector bring