Reflections on Water from a Renaissance Man and a Transcendentalist Poet Philosopher

Leonardo da Vinci , the Renaissance artist/inventor and Henry David Thoreau, a Transcendentalist naturalist/poet/philosopher, both wrote articulately and artistically about water.

In a time when scientists believed the world consisted of only four elements--water, air, fire, and earth--Leonardo da Vinci dreamed up sophisticated inventions and experiments. In his notebooks, he wrote extensively about his observations of eddies and currents and described 12 different kinds of waves. In explaining why the surface of flowing rivers presents "protuberances and hollows," da Vinci said that "just as a pair of stockings which cover the legs reveal what is hidden beneath them, so the part of the water which lies on the surface reveals the nature of its base." He obviously knew the Mediterranean region very well! Oh, and try to stump somebody with this riddle of water some day--"In its rapid course it often serves as a support to things heavier than itself. . .It submerges with itself in headlong course things lighter than itself."

Read da Vinci's comparison of bodies of water to the bodies of humans:

". . . as man has within himself bones as a stay and framework for the flesh, so the world has the rocks which are the supports of the earth; as man has within him a pool of blood wherein the lungs as he breathes expand and contract, so the body of the earth has its ocean, which also rises and falls every six hours with the breathing of the world; as from the said pool of blood proceed the veins which spread their branches through the human body, in just the same manner the ocean fills the body of the earth with an inifite number of veins of water."

Henry David Thoreau spent idyllic months observing and recording the passing of seasons around Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Read what he has to say about a halcyon inland lake:

. . . it is the earth's liquid eye, a mirror in the breast of nature. The sins of the wood are washed out in it. See how the woods form an amphitheatre about it, and it is an arena for all the genialness of nature. All trees direct the traveler to its brink, all paths seek it out, birds fly to it, quadrupeds flee to it, and the very ground inclines toward it. It is nature's saloon, where she has sat down to her toilet. Consider her silent economy and tidiness; how the sun comes with his evaporation to sweep the dust from its surface each morning, and a fresh surface is constantly welling up; and annually, after whatever impurities have accumulated herein, its liquid transparency appears again in the spring. In summer a hushed music seems to sweep across its surface. But now a plain sheet of snow conceals it from our eyes, except where the wind has swept the ice bare, and the sere leaves are gliding from side to side, tacking and veering on their tiny voyages."