When the Line Refused to End: M. C. Escher and the Art of Pencil Drawing

A young Dutchman named Maurits Cornelis Escher enters the Alhambra with a pencil in his pocket and stops before a geometric pattern covering a whole wall, with no beginning and no end, where every line returns by another path to the place where it began. When the wall asks by what right he copies what he does not understand, he answers that he wants to know how it lives, and is told to begin with a line. The line will not stop where he intends: a door opens onto a staircase ascending downward, a window shows the very room he stands in, a bird's wings enclose a fish, and water turns into sky, until the wall tells him he has only begun to learn how to see. Returning years later, he finds that line waiting for him, unaged, where he left it, and when it asks whether he has found where it ends, he realizes a human being may be only a brief line within a larger design; from then on he draws stairways that rise and fall at the same time and a hand drawing the hand that draws it. The closing pages teach pencil drawing, line, proportion, shading and perspective, and warn the reader that at the end of the line may wait someone who resembles him, watching from the other side of the page.