More Than a Rock

41What Is Enough

Fix a limit which you will not even desire to pass, should you have the power. At last, then, away with all these treacherous goods! They look better to those who hope for them than to those who have attained them.

—Lucius Annaeus Seneca

We tend to take visual art—the symbolizing of things both real and imaginary in two-dimensional images—as given. Those of us living today probably cannot imagine a life without images. And yet, the making of images is a fairly recent development in human history, and one we don’t yet completely understand. One of the predominant theories is that the first images were renditions of visions experienced under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. Further theories suggest that images, once conceived, ...