He said to himself that no doubt they would save her; the doctors would discover some remedy surely. He remembered all the miraculous cures he had been told about. Then she appeared to him dead. She was there; before his eyes, lying on her back in the middle of the road. He reined up, and the hallucination disappeared.

Now that I put on my glasses I could see that the hut was empty but for our two selves; that it must have been absolutely empty till we entered.

To the fashionable world he cannot be a stranger […] and his having married a sister of the Duke of Leeds is a voucher for my assertion.

Finally, McLuhanism is ambiguous on the post-modern ‘reversal’ in which reality is construed as a textual, symbolic and absent construction rather than the immediate existence and ‘givenness’ to experience that common sense and empiricism assume is foundational, even if open to debate.