Notebooks (45 page)

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Authors: Leonardo da Vinci,Irma Anne Richter,Thereza Wells

Tags: #History, #Fiction, #General, #European, #Art, #Renaissance, #Leonardo;, #Leonardo, #da Vinci;, #1452-1519, #Individual artists, #Art Monographs, #Drawing By Individual Artists, #Notebooks; sketchbooks; etc, #Individual Artist, #History - Renaissance, #Renaissance art, #Individual Painters - Renaissance, #Drawing & drawings, #Drawing, #Techniques - Drawing, #Individual Artists - General, #Individual artists; art monographs, #Art & Art Instruction, #Techniques

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The following lines are a variation of a verse in the populist fourteenth-century Florentine writer Antonio Pucci’s
Historia della Reina d’Oriente
.
He was blacker than a hornet, and his eyes were as red as a burning fire. He rode on a big stallion six spans across and more than twenty long, with six giants tied to his saddle bow and one in his hand who gnawed him with his tooth; and behind him came boars with tusks sticking out of their snouts perhaps ten spans.
55
VI
REFLECTIONS ON LIFE
These reflections inspired by Leonardo’s experience of life and of the ways of men were written down at random among other notes.
I. LIFE PASSES
What is fair in men passes and does not last.
1
One pushes down the other. By these square blocks are meant the life and the states of men.
2
 
We are deceived by promises and deluded by time, and death derides our cares; life’s anxieties are nought.
3
 
That man is extremely foolish who always is in want for fear of wanting; and his life flies away while he is still hoping to enjoy the good things which he has acquired with great labour.
4
 
He who possesses most is most afraid to lose.
5
 
O Time, consumer of all things! O envious age, thou destroyest all things and devourest all things with the hard teeth of the years little by little, in slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror and saw the withered wrinkles which old age had made in her face wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away. O Time, consumer of all things! O envious age, whereby all things are consumed!*
6
 
. . . The miserable life should not pass without leaving some memory of ourselves in the minds of mortals.
. . . Lead: Leather—a weight of lead pressing forwards and backwards a little bag of leather filled with air, the descent will show you the hour. We do not lack ways and means to divide and measure these miserable days of ours which it should be our pleasure not to spend and pass away in vain and without praise, and without leaving record of themselves in the minds of men; so that this our miserable course should not be spent in vain.
7
 
O thou that sleepest, what is sleep? Sleep resembles death. Oh, why not let thy work be such that after death thou mayst retain a resemblance to perfect life, rather than during life make thyself resemble the hapless dead by sleeping.
8
 
Shun those studies in which the work that results dies with the worker.
9
 
I obey thee, Lord, first for the love which I ought reasonably to bear thee; secondly, because thou canst shorten or prolong the lives of men.
10
 
In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes: so with time present. Life if well spent is long.
11
 
The age as it flies glides secretly and deceives one and another; nothing is more fleeting than the years, but he who sows virtue reaps honour.
12
 
In youth acquire that which may restore the damage of old age; and if you are mindful that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so exert yourself in youth, that your old age will not lack sustenance.
13
 
While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
14
 
To the ambitious, whom neither the boon of life, nor the beauty of the world suffice to content, it comes as penance that life with them is squandered, and that they possess neither the benefits nor the beauty of the world.
15
 
As a day well spent brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.
16
 
Every evil leaves a sorrow in the memory, except the supreme evil, death, which destroys this memory together with life.
17
 
Wrongfully do men lament the flight of time, accusing it of being too swift, and not perceiving that its period is sufficient. But good memory wherewith nature has endowed us causes everything long past to seem present.
18
 
Our judgement does not reckon in their exact and proper order things which have come to pass at different periods of time; for many things which happened many years ago will seem nearly related to the present, and many things that are recent will seem ancient, extending back to the far-off period of our youth. And so it is with the eye, with regard to distant things, which when illumined by the sun seem near to the eye, while many things which are near seem far off.
19
 
Behold the hope and the desire of going back to one’s country and of returning to the primal state of chaos is like that of the moth to the light, and of the man who with perpetual longing looks forward with joy to each new spring and to each new summer, and to the new months and the new years, deeming that the things he longs for are too slow in coming; and he does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction. But this longing is in its quintessence, the spirit of the elements, which finding itself imprisoned as the soul within the human body is ever longing to return to its sender; and I would have you know that this same longing is that quintessence inherent in nature, and that man is a type of the world.
20
 
Among the great things which are found among us the existence of judgement is the greatest. This dwells in time, and stretches its limbs into the past and future, and with these takes to itself all works that are past and those that are to come, both of nature and of the animals, and possesses nothing of the indivisible present. It does not, however, extend to the essence of anything.
21
 
Nothingness has no centre, and its boundaries are nothingness.
My opponent says that nothingness and a vacuum are one and the same thing, having indeed two separate names by which they are called, but not existing separately in nature. The reply is that whenever there exists a vacuum there will also be the space which surrounds it, but nothingness exists apart from occupation of space; it follows that nothingness and a vacuum are not the same, for the one is divisible to infinity, and nothingness cannot be divided because nothing can be less than it is; and if you were to take part from it this part would be equal to the whole, and the whole to the part.
22
II. LIFE OF THE BODY
How the body of the animal continually dies and is renewed
The body of anything whatsoever that takes nourishment continually dies and is continually renewed; because nourishment can only enter in those places where the preceding nourishment is exhausted, and if it is exhausted it no longer has life. And unless you supply nourishment equivalent to that which has departed, life will fail in its vigour, and if you deprive it of its nourishment the life is entirely destroyed. But if you restore as much as is destroyed day by day, then as much of the life is renewed as is consumed; just as the light of the candle is formed by the nourishment given to it by the liquid of this candle which light continually renews by swift succour from beneath as much as it consumes in dying above; and in dying changes from a brilliant light into murky smoke; and this death is continuous, as the smoke is continuous; and the smoke continues as long as the nourishment continues; and in the same instant the whole light is dead and is entirely regenerated by the movement of that which nourishes it.
23
 
Why nature did not ordain that one animal should not live by the death of another.
Nature being inconstant and taking pleasure in creating and making continually new lives and forms, because she knows that they augment her terrestrial substance, is more ready and swift in creating than time is in destroying; and therefore she has ordained that many animals shall serve as food one for the other; and as this does not suffice for her desire she frequently sends forth certain poisonous and pestilential vapours and continual plagues upon the vast accumulations and herds of animals; and most of all upon men, who increase rapidly because other animals do not feed upon them; and if the causes are removed the effects would cease.
This earth therefore seeks to lose its life while desiring continual reproduction for the reason brought forward and demonstrated by you; effects often resemble their causes. The animals serve as a type of the life of the world.
24
 
Here nature appears rather to have been a cruel stepmother to many animals instead of a mother; and to some not a stepmother but a most tender mother.
25
 
Our life is made by the death of others. In dead matter insensible life remains, which reunited to the stomachs of living beings, resumes life, both sensual and intellectual.
26
 
Man and animals are really the passage and conduit of food, the sepulchre of animals and resting-place of the dead, making life out of the death of the other (taking pleasure in the misery of others), making themselves the covering for corruption.
8
 
If nature has ordained that animals which can move should experience pain in order to conserve those parts which through their motion might diminish or waste; plants are not able to move and therefore do not strike against any objects placed in their way; the feeling of pain is not required in plants and therefore they do not feel pain when they are broken, as animals do.
27
 
Lust is the cause of generation,
Appetite is the support of life,
Fear or timidity is the prolongation of life, and fraud the preservation of its instruments.
28
 
He who fears dangers does not perish by them.
29
 
Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.
30
 
Fear arises sooner than anything else.
31
 
Every man wishes to make money to give to the doctors, destroyers of life; they therefore ought to be rich.
32
 
Learn to preserve your health; and in this you will the better succeed as you shun physicians because their drugs are a kind of alchemy about which there are no fewer books than there are medicines.
33
 
Medicine is the restoration of discordant elements; sickness is the discord of the elements infused into the living body.
34
 
Make them give you the diagnosis and treatment for the case from the saint and from the other and you will see that men are elected to be doctors for diseases they do not know.
35
To keep in health this rule is wise:*
Eat only when you want and sup light.
Chew well, and let what you take be well cooked and simple.
He who takes medicine is ill advised.
Beware of anger and avoid grievous moods.
Keep standing when you rise from table.
Do not sleep at midday.
Let your wine be mixed (with water), take little at a time, not between meals and not on an empty stomach.
Go regularly to stool.
If you take exercise, let it be light.
Do not be with the belly upwards, or the head lowered;
Be covered well at night.
Rest your head and keep your mind cheerful.
Shun wantonness, and pay attention to diet.
36

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