The da Vinci scene is Annie Dillard bringing back an image she planted earlier in *For the Time Being*. On page 39, while watching a nurse wash newborns, she recounts Leonardo’s supposed earliest memory: a kite, a bird of prey, put its tail in his mouth as he lay in his cradle. In the closing pages, Dillard imagines that bird flying through the hospital and touching the mouth of a newborn Leonardo. The hospital scene and the cradle memory are being joined in her imagination.

The image holds birth and death together. Dillard has just described the earth burying people and whole civilizations; earlier, she points out that kites also eat corpses. Then this same bird appears at the mouth of a baby. Her point is less a secret explanation of Leonardo’s genius than the strangeness of any beginning: a helpless, anonymous infant can become someone whose life we remember centuries later, while generations keep arriving after all of us are gone.

That is why the nurse immediately sets the “da Vinci bundle” beside the other babies and reaches for another. Even Leonardo is one newborn in an endless procession. The surreal return of his cradle image makes the book’s scale of time—one life, many generations, life emerging from and returning to the earth—feel vivid for a moment.