EXPLORATION // DRAWING TO UNDERSTAND REALITY
Wandering Locks
Hair and water in the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci
by Walter Foley
EXCERPT //
In a brief scene from the 2009 documentary Collision, Christopher Hitchens divulged the only claim for the existence of God that would routinely cause him and his fellow atheists to pause.
“At some point, certainly, we are all asked which is the best argument you come up against from the other side,” he says to his debate partner, Pastor Douglas Wilson, during a car ride. “And I think every one of us picks the ‘fine-tuning’ one as the most intriguing. … You have to spend time thinking about it, working on it. It’s not ... trivial. We all say that.
It’s possible—and perhaps probable—that life throughout the universe is extremely rare, requiring an environment eerily and beautifully accommodating to us.
Venus is too hot; Mars is too cold, but between them is a thriving blue and white and green and golden planet, covered in a liquid that behaves very differently from others.
Plenty of smart people hypothesize that there could be other life forms out there with chemistries unknown to us that don’t necessitate water. But these remain hypotheses.
Is the sort of life we’re familiar with here on Earth exceptional throughout the universe? Or is it common?
We don’t know. But, as far as we can tell, life requires water, which, atypical of other substances, naturally occurs on our planet in solid, liquid, and gas forms. Also atypical of other substances, it gets less dense in its solid form, which allows ice to float while life continues in the ocean below.
It moves in a mystifying but familiar way.
Put yourself in front of a blank sheet of paper.
Now, draw water.
Do you start with a lowercase m and repeat for a bit?
Do you instinctively reach for something blue?
A recurring theme throughout the personal and professional notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci is a fascination with water: how it behaves, how it is beautiful, how it is terrifying. //
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