Modern people make horrible contemplators of icons. This is not only because we have excised icons from the venues in which they were originally deployed, hanging them on the walls of this-or-that National-Gallery-of- Art. It has also to do with the way we see things. We trust sight in a way pre-modern people never could. Consider the contact lens: Small convex pieces of silicon we place over our pupils to refract light more precisely onto our retinas. We put them in and we forget about them—until our eyes begin to burn. But even then we rarely think of contacts as mediators that decisively affect our capacity to trust in sight. Or consider the television. With a tap of a button it comes on, bringing us images from … where? New York, Hollywood, London—one, two, three thousand miles away. This is mediation, and we trust it so much that we have forgotten to experience it as such. The relevant question is, Why?