Why do baths incubate ideas?

By M.H.

BATHS ARE everywhere—and not just in bathrooms. Once you start to look for them, they can be found in the works of great writers, artists and thinkers. They have been tied to ideas and creativity since Archimedes’s “Eureka!” moment, when the rising of his bathwater as he got in helped him to formulate his principle of volume. The milk of 7,000 donkeys was reportedly needed to fill one of Cleopatra’s beautifying daily baths.

How people choose to bathe is particular and private, an intimate ritual that goes beyond cleansing. Douglas Adams spent much of his life cogitating in baths, to the bemusement—and occasional fury—of his flatmate. “A towel,” he wrote in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, “is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.” From time to time, Winston Churchill strategised from his bath, including during the second world war. “Performance” (1970), a psychedelic and seedy crime drama, emphasised the steamier side-effects of hot water. After one scene, where Mick Jagger engages in a ménage à trois in an art deco bathtub with Anita Pallenberg and Michèle Breton, “even the bathwater,” a studio executive shuddered, “was dirty.” Elsewhere, baths have a stultifying effect, leaving the bather vulnerable. In “Oresteia” Agamemnon is stabbed to death in the bathtub by Clytemnestra; in 1793 Charlotte Corday plunged a knife into Jean-Paul Marat’s chest while he convalesced, a murder immortalised in Jacques-Louis David’s painting.