Thus the Romantic poets were consciously in revolt against printed
books as shackles on the human spirit. They turned to landscape
and the pictorial presentation of experience long before the arrival of
photography. And Poe’s discovery about writing poems and stories
backwards contained, years in advance, not only the secret of modern
laboratory science but of the movie.
	One reason for dwelling on this point is in order to suggest a deep
relation between letters and non-literary forms of expression. For if
such inter-relations have previously obtained, it may provide hope
and comfort for those who wish to see literature maintained at pre-
sent. 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 about a mysterious change in everyday experience.
The movie reconstructs the external daylight world and in so doing
provides an interior dream world. Hollywood means "sacred grove",
and from this modern grove has issued a new pantheon of gods and
goddesses to fashion and trouble the dreams of modern man.
	Another way of seeing this mysterious medium for transforming
experience is to consider it as the exact embodiment of Plato’s Cave.
The dreaming eye of the movie god casting his images on the dark
screen corresponds to that image of human life offered to us by Plato
in the Republic: existence is a kind of cave or cellar on the back wall of
which we watch the shadows of real things from the outside world
of reality.
	In ordinary perception men perform the miracle of recreating within
themselves, in their interior faculties, the exterior world. This mir-
acle is the work of the nous poietikos or of the agent intellect -- that is,
the poetic or creative process. The exterior world in every instant of
perception is interiorized and recreated in a new matter. Ourselves. And
in this creative work that is perception and cognition, we experience
immediately that dance of Being within our faculties which provides
the incessant intuition of Being. I can only regard the movie as the
mechanization and distortion of this cognitive miracle by which we
recreate within ourselves the exterior world. But whereas cognition pro-
vides 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.
 from "Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters." THE MEDIUM AND THE LIGHT.
 Ed. Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek. Toronto:Stoddart, 1999:165.