Quoted from the book, Visions of Symmetry, Abrams Publishing, New York, page 241 Capturing Infinity Infinity - humans can only imagine it, never experience it. The concept permeates human thought, yet defies human understanding. It is invoked to answer otherwise unanswerable questions. In his book, Against Infinity: A Cultural History of the Infinite, Eli Maor describes many of the varied attempts by philosophers, scientists, and artists to define, to understand, and to use the concept of infinity. He devotes a chapter to Escher’s work, calling him a "master of the infinite". Escher sought to capture infinity in visual images. In 1959, in an essay, "Approaches to Infinity", he wrote, Anyone who plunges into infinity, in both time and space, farther and farther without stopping, needs fixed points, mileposts as he flashes by, for otherwise his movement is indistinguishable from standing still. There must be stars past which he shoots, beacons by which he can measure the path he has traveled. He must mark off his universe into units of a certain length, into compartments which repeat one another in endless succession. Each time he crosses the border from one compartment to another, his clock ticks. Anyone who wants to create a universe on a two-dimensional surface (he is somewhat deluding himself because in our three-dimensional world there cannot exist a reality of two dimensions nor of four) notices that time passes while he is working on his creation. But when he has finished and inspects what he has done, he then sees something that is static and timeless: in his depiction no clock ticks; there is only a flat, motionless expanse. The dynamic, steady ticking of the clock at the crossing of each border in our trip through space has grown mute, but we can replace it, in a static way, by the periodic repetition of congruent figures on our drawing plane, closed forms that border one another, determine each other’s shape and fill the surface in every direction as far as we wish to go.