“But in Leonardo’s world the very air was different; it made people want to think. Science came into its own.” 

We are reading a biography of Leonardo Da Vinci and we are in awe of him. We are still in the early years of his life/career, but we are already inspired by his curiousity, his talent, and genius. Here is a depiction of the theatre set he invented for the staging of the myth of Orpheus in Milan.  

“He was great purely because of his tremendous intellect. It was his brain that created the adventure of his life, and that adventure is still exciting today, five centuries later.”

9 year old son’s fascination with simple machines such as gears is back because of reading about Da Vinci through a living book. The ideas presented moved my son to imagine, explore, and be inspired. That is not likely to happen from a dry textbook, even if it had all the illustrations of Da Vinci’s machines or art. 

So far, these are the other people who have left a big mark in our way of thinking: King Alfred the Great, Jose Rizal, Columbus, and Benjamin Franklin. Their lives left a mark not just because we read about their strengths, but more because we learned about their struggles and weaknesses. We grew to appreciate what they have done because we understood the time and place from which they came from.

We did not merely read a list of what they had accomplished, we got to know them. That’s how living books work.