## What the da Vinci "dream" is doing in this text

The text is Annie Dillard's *For the Time Being* (1999). The passage isn't stray or out of place — it's a planted image that Dillard uses twice, once early and once as the very last scene in the book, and the gap between those two appearances is the point.

### First appearance (Birth chapter, ~line 290–292)

Dillard is in a hospital nursery watching newborns get washed and swaddled. She quotes E. M. Forster:

> "We move between two darknesses. The two entities who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so."

Right after that she drops in Leonardo da Vinci's own earliest memory, recorded in his notebooks (not actually a "dream" — a memory, though it's famous partly because Freud later analyzed it as a fantasy in *Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood*):

> "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."

Dillard adds a detail da Vinci didn't: the kite (a bird of prey) "also eats corpses." That's the hinge. She's using the anecdote to physically enact the Forster line — a bird that touches both the newborn's mouth and the corpse becomes a literal emissary moving between the "two darknesses" of birth and death, which is the whole chapter's subject.

### Second appearance (final page of the book, ~line 1346)

At the very end, after 200-some pages tracing Teilhard de Chardin, Kabbalah, the Baal Shem Tov, terra-cotta soldiers, and repeated tallies of how many humans have ever lived and died, Dillard returns to the same nursery and the same nurse (Pat Eisberg) she introduced back in the Birth chapter. But now she stages the da Vinci memory as if it's actually happening on that counter:

> "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... 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... waves of new generations appear in bundles on counters."

This is the closing move of the entire book. Da Vinci — a singular, unrepeatable genius — gets folded back into the anonymous assembly line of "bundles on counters," indistinguishable from every other newborn the nurse has processed. It's the same argument the book has been making with its running body counts ("the dead outnumber the living... 85 billion... could be as high as 20 to 1"): even the most exceptional individual life is one wave in an indifferent, endless procession of generations.

### Why it works as a device

Dillard's method throughout the book is to braid unrelated strands — natural history, mysticism, a paleontologist's diary, hospital reportage — and let them recur rather than argue a thesis linearly. The da Vinci kite is one of several images she seeds early and echoes at the close (others include the Baal Shem Tov, the loess/clay motif, and the Teilhard quotations). Planting it in the Birth chapter as literary allusion and then literalizing it in the final paragraph as a hallucinatory scene in the same nursery is what gives the ending its charge: it collapses "the most famous mind in history" and "the anonymous baby on the counter" into the same image, which is Dillard's real point about time, birth, and death.

**Note:** I'm inferring you're reading this file as part of the same task/session (the working directory is literally named `01-da-vinci-dream`), since your question had no other context attached. If you meant something else by "this," let me know.