# What the da Vinci "dream" is doing in *For the Time Being*

Short answer: it is not a dream, and it is not a digression. It is Dillard's one report from inside the cradle, and she uses it twice, once near the start of the book (p. 39) and once as the second-to-last paragraph (p. 204), so that the book ends where it began, with a bird prying open a newborn's mouth.

## What the passage actually is

The lines Dillard quotes come from Leonardo's own notebooks. While writing about the flight of birds, around 1505, he broke off to record what he called his earliest memory: a kite (a two-foot bird of prey with a forked tail) came to him in his cradle, opened his mouth with its tail, and struck the inside of his lips several times. Leonardo took it as a sign of his destiny, which is why it turns up in the middle of his notes on how birds fly.

Freud later built a whole book on this passage and read it as a fantasy rather than a memory, which is probably why it gets called a dream. Dillard skips Freud entirely. She takes it straight, as a memory, and adds only the bird's natural history: the kite soars like a swallow, swoops like a hawk, and eats corpses.

## Why it is on page 39

Look at the sentence right before it. Dillard quotes E. M. Forster: we move between two darknesses, and the two beings who could tell us about them, the baby and the corpse, cannot speak. Then, immediately: "How I love Leonardo da Vinci's earliest memory!"

Leonardo is the exception to Forster. He is the one baby who did report back from the cradle. And what came to him there was a bird that lives on corpses. In a single image the two darknesses touch: the carrion bird lays its tail across the newborn's lips. That is the whole book's subject compressed into three sentences. Birth and death are one continuous event, and something wild reaches in from outside and touches us at the start.

The placement inside the maternity ward matters too. Two paragraphs earlier Dillard has the Qur'an's image of Allah making man from a clot of blood and blowing into it, and the red baby at the sink is that clot. The kite is the same gesture in another key. A mouth is opened from outside. Breath, or vocation, or the world itself, gets in.

## Why it comes back on page 204

The last "Birth" passage in the book is a deliberate fusion of two scenes that were separate on page 39. Nurse Pat Eisberg, who has been washing babies at the same sink through all seven chapters, now holds the kite herself. She releases it, it opens the mouth of "infant Leonardo da Vinci," and it flaps off down the hospital corridor. Then she puts "the da Vinci bundle" on the counter and reaches for the next one.

Several things happen at once here:

- **Leonardo becomes one bundle among the bundles.** The greatest mind in the book's cast, treated like every other red newborn, washed like a dish and pushed down the counter. Every baby on the counter could be a Leonardo. Every Leonardo was once a baby on a counter.
- **1452 and a Monday morning in the 1990s become the same moment.** The next sentences make this explicit: "then as now, waves of new generations appear in bundles on counters." The book's title is the point. Each of us is here for the time being, and the "being" keeps arriving.
- **She kills the reader.** "You are dead," she says, mid-paragraph. She has written the sentence from a future in which whoever is holding the book is gone and the counter is still full. This is the same vision she has just had at Xi'an on the facing page, where she watches the earth itself walking and plowing the men under. "No one sees generations churn." The kite passage is the hopeful half of that vision: the earth plows us under, and the counter refills.
- **The mouth motif closes.** Early in the book, in the terracotta trench at Xi'an, she sees a clay soldier emerging from the dug wall with his mouth wide open, "as if he were swimming the Australian crawl and just catching a breath." On page 203 the soldiers "seem to swim from the dirt to the light." On page 204 the kite pries a living mouth open. Emerging from the earth, catching breath, being opened: the book keeps circling one gesture.

## Why it is followed by the airplane

The very last paragraph is the man in Highland New Guinea who lashes himself to the fuselage of a plane because "he had to see where it came from." Read it against the kite. Leonardo's memory is the origin of his obsession with flight, and the passage came from his notebook on flying. The kite "widens into flight." Then a man ties himself to a flying machine and rides it toward its source. The book ends on that pairing: something from the sky reaches down and touches the infant, and the grown man throws himself at the sky to find out where it came from. That is Dillard's own posture in this book, and the posture she is recommending. You cannot mend the chromosome or stanch the flood, she says two pages earlier. You can still lash yourself to the thing and go see.

## One line version

The kite is the only witness Dillard has from the first darkness, and it happens to eat the dead. She opens the book's ward scene with it and closes the book with it so that the newborn and the corpse, Leonardo and the anonymous red baby, 1452 and now, all land on the same counter under the same heat lamp.

*Assumption noted: I read the three photos as pages 39 and 203 to 204 of the paperback, and matched them to the text file in the inputs folder. The Freud detail is background context, not something Dillard mentions.*