Opinion | Marshall McLuhan Was Right About Claude, Too - The New York Times

In his classic book “Understanding Media,” Marshall McLuhan dwells on the Greek myth of Narcissus. If it’s been a while since you’ve read it, the story, in Ovid’s telling, goes like this: Narcissus is born gorgeous, the son of the river god Cephissus and the nymph Liriope. He is desired by many but is callous and indifferent in response. He is cursed to love what he cannot have, and finds that love when he stumbles across a reflection of himself in a pool and wastes away, staring into his own shimmering eyes. (In other versions of the myth, he leans forward to kiss his reflection, falls into the water and drowns.) It is, McLuhan says, a reflection of our own “narcotic culture” that we have come to talk of narcissism as a love of oneself. But that’s not what the tale reveals. “The Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself,” McLuhan writes. Its real point is that “men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves i

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