“The etymology of all human technologies is to be found in the body itself: they are, as it were, prosthetic devices, mutations, metaphors of the body or its parts.”
— Marshall McLuhan (Explorations in Visual and Acoustic Space)
“The loneliest people above all contribute most to commonality. I have said earlier that one person might hear more and another less of the vast melody of life; accordingly, the latter has a smaller or lesser duty in the great orchestra. The individual who could hear the entire melody would be at once the loneliest and the most common, for he [or she] would hear what no one else hears and yet only because he [or she] would grasp in its perfect completeness that which others strain to hear obscurely and only in parts.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from “On Solitude,” The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, ed. and trans. Ulrich Baer (Modern Library, 2005)
countervisuality 