Da Vinci’s dream

The Da Vinci Dream in For the Time Being: What It’s Doing There and What It Means

In the pages you photographed from Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being—first on page 39 (Chapter Two, BIRTH) and then returning at the very end of the book on pages 203–204 (Chapter Seven, NOW)—Dillard takes a famous scrap of Renaissance biography and turns it into one of the book’s central hinges.

Here is how the image works across those two passages and what it means in the larger architecture of the book.

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1. What the “Dream” Actually Is

In his Codex Atlanticus, in the middle of scientific notes on the flight of birds, Leonardo da Vinci recorded what he described as his earliest childhood recollection (famously misidentified by Sigmund Freud as a “vulture” dream, due to a German mistranslation of the Italian nibbio, a kite):

“As I was in my cradle a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips.”

For Leonardo, this cradle visitation felt like an omen of destiny: a bird of prey forcefully initiating him into his lifelong obsession with flight, anatomy, and the workings of the physical world.

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2. How Dillard Plants It on Page 39 (Chapter Two: BIRTH)

When the quote first appears on page 39, Dillard is standing in a hospital obstetrical ward watching Nurse Pat Eisberg wash newborns at a double chrome sink “like dishes,” swaddle a red newborn into a “one-quart Thermos” bundle, and slide him down the counter.

Look at how Dillard sets up the Leonardo memory by placing it immediately after a quote from E. M. Forster:

“We move between two darknesses,” E. M. Forster wrote. “The two entities who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so.”

How I love Leonardo da Vinci’s earliest memory! “As I was in my cradle a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips.” The European kite, two feet long, has a deeply forked tail. Soaring like a swallow, it swoops hawklike to snatch reptiles; it also eats corpses.

On page 39, the kite does something startling: it bridges Forster’s two mute entities—the corpse and the baby.

• The European kite is a scavenger that eats corpses and a predator that pries open the mouth of the baby in its cradle. Raw, unsentimental nature—fed on the dead—reaches into the mouth of the newly born and strikes its lips awake.
• Just one page later (p. 40), Dillard connects the newborn’s mouth to the deep-sea vents where life erupts (“deep-sea mouths”) and to Rabbi Isaac Luria’s opening prayer in Safad: “Open thou my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise.”
• Later, in Chapter Four’s BIRTH section (pp. 99–101), while watching Pat Eisberg wash another baby at the same sink, Dillard layers three more “mouth” motifs onto this one:
  1. Anthropologist Gary Clevidence’s remark that once humans begin speaking, “the unit of reproduction becomes the mouth”—the vessel of culture, thought, art, and science.
  2. Baby Krishna’s mouth, inside which his mother sees the entire cosmos and herself.
  3. The Talmudic midrash of the angel in the womb, who taps each fetus on the lips right before birth so that it forgets its cosmic omniscience and joins “the bewildered human race.”

Leonardo’s kite is the ferocious inverse of that Talmudic angel: instead of tapping the infant’s lips shut into forgetfulness, the bird of prey pries the infant’s lips open—an initiation into speech, consciousness, and relentless curiosity.

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3. Why It Comes Back on Pages 203–204 (Chapter Seven: NOW)

By the final NOW section at the end of the book, Dillard’s method is to collapse all of history and geography into a single simultaneous present. Across the last few pages, she splices every thread she has been braiding for seven chapters into the same frame:

• The 18th-century Baal Shem Tov is walking now along the walls of Jerusalem;
• “Twiglike hominids” (her image for both early Homo species and modern Chinese peasants) walk now outside a U.S. hospital;
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes from his Nazi prison cot now;
• Teilhard de Chardin sorts Pleistocene bones outside his tent now, visible through the window above Dillard’s daughter’s homework table;
• A Roman soldier flays Rabbi Akiva (135 C.E.) right alongside a 20th-century doctor breathing life into a newborn.

Then, at the bottom of page 203 and top of page 204, Dillard fuses the 1990s maternity nurse Pat Eisberg directly into 1452 Italy with infant Leonardo da Vinci:

Nurse Pat Eisberg holds in her arms a two-foot bird of prey, a kite. She releases the kite which uses one point of its forked tail to pry open the mouth of infant Leonardo da Vinci. The kite runs its tail’s length between the newborn’s almost invisible lips; then it widens into flight and flaps down the corridor. Pat Eisberg places the da Vinci bundle on the counter to her right and reaches left for another. This newborn, like everyone, is someone’s great-grandchild. You are dead, and daily, then as now, waves of new generations appear in bundles on counters.

This surreal splice accomplishes three things at the climax of the book:

A. Demystifying the Past and Sanctifying the Present (“Then as now”)

Throughout For the Time Being, Dillard attacks two opposite human illusions: the nostalgia that past ages were populated by mythic giants (“There were no formerly heroic times”), and the narcissism that our present moment is the climax of history. By putting infant Leonardo da Vinci on Pat Eisberg’s Formica counter as just another swaddled “Thermos” bundle—washed, initiated by a kite, slid to the right while the nurse reaches left for the next baby—Dillard shows that:

1. Even Leonardo da Vinci arrived as a red, anonymous parcel of cells on a counter, “someone’s great-grandchild,” part of the relentless biological churn.
2. Every anonymous baby on the counter today arrives with that same terrifying, world-altering potential—part of what Teilhard called “the layer of human thought” and what the Kabbalists and Abraham Joshua Heschel called the human hands, eyes, and lips through which the divine becomes conscious of the world (“Without our eyes, the Holy One of Being would be blind”).

B. Holding Death and Birth in the Same Frame

Look at the paragraph immediately preceding the kite on page 203: Dillard stands at Emperor Qin’s tomb in Xi’an watching two Chinese farmers plow the loess soil, and realizes “the earth was plowing the men under, and the spade, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting.”

Immediately after watching the earth swallow the living into the dead, Dillard cuts back to the hospital sink—what she earlier called “the wildest deep-sea vent on earth: This is where the people come out.” And she addresses you, the reader, from the perspective of deep time: “You are dead, and daily, then as now, waves of new generations appear in bundles on counters.” The corpse-eating kite prying open the newborn’s mouth is the exact emblem of how life feeds on death and bursts back into awareness, generation after generation.

C. Launching the Final Image of the Book (Flight and Reckless Curiosity)

Notice how the kite “widens into flight and flaps down the corridor” on page 204, leading straight into the book’s final paragraph: the 1930s Papua New Guinea highlander—from a mountain tribe that had never seen the outside world—who cuts vines and lashes himself to the fuselage of a British officer’s airplane just before takeoff, explaining calmly to his loved ones “that, no matter what happened to him, he had to see where it came from.”

The kite flying down the maternity ward corridor links infant Leonardo da Vinci (who grew up trying to build flying machines and dissect corpses to understand how nature works) to the New Guinea villager strapping himself to an airplane. Both are Dillard’s answer to what it means to be human “for the time being”: we are brief bundles slid across a counter between two darknesses, soon to be plowed under—yet once the fierce bird of life pries our mouths open, our task is to wake up, look hard, and risk everything to see where it came from.