More Than a Rock, 2nd Edition

43What 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, whose evolution we don’t yet completely understand. One theory suggests that the first images made were renditions of visions experienced under the influence of hallucinogens. Other theories suggest that images, once conceived, became ...