The Da Vinci code to life

Book review of How to Think like Da Vinci

Lynne Truss, author of that peerless book on grammar and usage titled Eats, Shoots and Leaves, attributed the decline of punctuation to the rising use of text messaging. She wrote this before the explosion of social media so you can guess that she must be trebly appalled today at the steady massacre of the English language. Grammar and punctuation are not the only casualties of the rise of the SMS, Twitter and WhatsApp schools of communication. Reading habits, too, have been altered so dynamically that any wordage beyond the scope of a limited set of characters has little chance of being read. The beleaguered publishing industry has made a gallant attempt to address this drastic alteration in literary proclivities by creating an expanding genre of “self-help” books that combine life-coaching with quasi-psychiatric truisms.

How to Think Like Da Vinci, the book under review, falls squarely in this category. Its author, Daniel Smith, appears to have created a personal cottage industry in the potted life coach business, having written no less than eight books before this one advising potential readers how to think like: Sherlock, Steve Jobs, Mandela, Einstein, Churchill, Bill Gates, Freud and Obama (no woman has been deemed worthy of his attention). That at least one of his subjects is fictional does not appear to have deterred him or the buying public: according to his then publisher, How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes sold over 30,000 copies. 

Mr Smith’s credentials for offering advice on life and living are unclear. This slim book of 204 pages contains none of the obligatory information about the author. An internet search is not particularly revelatory either. It describes him as “non-fiction author and editor who has written across a range of subjects, including politics, economics and social history”. He is also, the information sheet says, a contributor to The Statesman’s Yearbook, a geo-political guide that has been published from the UK for over 150 years.

If I sound uber-cynical about this book, it’s because Mr Smith has employed the kind of trite technique that can be readily found in the weekend health sections of daily paper or in those discourses of art of living-style gurus. It has a certain facetious appeal but a deeper probe reveals arrant illogic in most of it.

That starts with the premise of the title. It suggests that emulating Da Vinci’s thought processes will catapult one into a rarefied world of high achievement.  Leonardo Da Vinci was, by any yardstick, a genius. That means he was, if we go by the dictionary definition, exceptional. All human beings cannot be exceptional, even if they follow the thought processes or habits of a chosen genius. Stan Wawrinka has a sublime one-handed backhand, just like his mentor Roger Federer. Mr Wawrinka is a very good tennis player; Mr Federer is a genius. 

In any case, we do not know if Da Vinci actually thought the way Mr Smith says he did. The process is deductive and interpretative. For instance, he uses Da Vinci’s humble, difficult childhood — he was the neglected, unloved, illegitimate child of a gentleman and a serving girl — as lesson number one. That Da Vinci grew up to become a giant of Renaissance art and science despite his origins holds, according to the author, a lesson that you, the reader, must “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. 

It seems not to have occurred to the author that the unique era in which Da Vinci lived, which saw the flowering of patronage of culture and intellectual life, may have had as much of a starring role to play in nurturing his genius (after all, Michelangelo was a contemporary and sometime rival). Da Vinci’s greatest patron was Lorenzo de Medici, the Florentine ruler who is generally credited with ushering in a golden age of the arts. Had Da Vinci been born, say, in 15th century Afghanistan, would he have painted some equivalent of the Mona Lisa or experimented with the science of flight? 

Da Vinci’s manifest exceptionalism does not deter Mr Smith from placing him within a deceptively achievable template for lesser human beings to follow, and he confidently generalises on his various attributes. “Indulge Your Playful Side” is one of the prescriptions on offer. The opening line of this section says: “Da Vinci approached his work with an energy and seriousness of intent that few individuals have come to equalling”. Really? How does he know this? Anyway, this “playful side”, according to the author was manifest in his stage designs for grand spectacles that were staged by wealthy patrons and by “several jokes and bawdy tales”.  

There’s lots more in this vein: “Study, Study, Study”, “Read like Da Vinci” (ha ha), “Get to the Heart of the Matter” and similar banalities. If the book has one virtue, it is that it offers a useful abbreviated biography of Da Vinci, which is also helpfully bullet-pointed in six pages. Increasingly prosperous Indians who stand in those interminable queues for the obligatory view of Mona Lisa at the Louvre may find it a useful rapid read, even if the subtleties of the artist’s thought processes eludes them.

HOW TO THINK LIKE DA VINCI

Daniel Smith

Hachette, Rs 299, 204 pages