A literary scholar — biographer of David Jones — whose talk at a 2002–03 Ottawa McLuhan conference, collected in the 2004 volume At the Speed of Light There Is Only Illumination, Bob quotes across two sessions. Bob prizes Dilworth for "referring to the basics accurately" where most readers of McLuhan do not, even as Cameron presses that Dilworth still comes down on one side of the acoustic/visual metaphor and so misses the tactility. The page holds the two passages Bob reads: the 1973 St. Basil's paraphrase against the evolutionists, and the acoustic-man passage on the sphere.
Across the dialogues
Enters through Bob's collage — his paraphrase of McLuhan's 1973 St. Basil's talk against the evolutionists, folded into the book beside the "Baroque Spiral"
Dilworth's paraphrase of McLuhan's March 1973 St. Basil's Seminary talk, which Bob folds into his book's "Baroque Spiral" as McLuhan's mockery of the evolutionists — "evolution is an unfortunate metaphor," and "Spengler was right, Western man went down the hill and he disappeared."
"Teilhard de Chardin fell into the trap of thinking there was a direction,"
Read more warily — the same essay's acoustic-space passage praised as accurate yet faulted for coming down on one side of the visual/acoustic metaphor
The line at the center of Dilworth's reading — an accurate rendering of McLuhan's acoustic space that Cameron nonetheless faults for the added "or center" (McLuhan's sphere has margins that are "also potentially centered") and for resolving the visual/acoustic metaphor onto one side, losing the tactility and the "complete disaster" that also waits at the speed of light.
"Acoustic man lives not in a continuum but in a sphere without margin or center."
Connections
Dilworth reads and paraphrases McLuhan — the 1973 St. Basil's Seminary talk against the evolutionists, and the acoustic-space passage on the sphere "without margin or center."