Poison for Breakfast

by Lemony Snicket

I read something once that describes the sea as “all a case of knives” and I have never forgotten it. It is a description I admire very much, because it is so startling that you know no one else has thought of it before the author did, and yet so perfectly clear that you wonder why you never thought of it yourself. All good writing is like this. It is why a favorite book feels like an old friend and a new acquaintance at the same time, and the reason a favorite author can be a familiar figure and a mysterious stranger all at once.

There’s another line in the poem which rattled in my head as I ran: “The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.” A galleon is a type of old ship, but I didn’t know that then, and because the word “galleon” looks like the word “gallon,” I thought it was some sort of bottle, tossed on the sea with a message inside. I liked the idea that the moon had a message in it and that some night, if I kept racing around, I might be the person to receive it.

I also sometimes kept watch by my bedroom window at night, looking for a kidnappers’ car or any other sign of something terrible that might happen. A murderer, I thought, a werewolf. I do not know how to describe the way I felt when I was thinking about these things. I almost had to hold my breath, because it was wonderful and terrible at the very same time.

For a few moments I stared at the scrap of paper in my hands and tried to get my thoughts in order. I even tried to number them, in case it helped. 1.Egad! 2.There’s no use thinking egad, Snicket. Remain calm. No, wait, that should be your third thought. 3.Remain calm. 4.That’s better. 5.Now, then, look at the message again. 6.You had poison for breakfast. 7.Egad! 8.Stop it. 9.Right.

And if it’s not a joke, then it’s an emergency.

This morning was née pleasant.

Many, many more people have died than are living now, so when you die you will have something in common with the vast majority of human beings, but still it is as impossible to imagine as it is to avoid. You’ve probably tried to imagine it before, as I have, closing your eyes and lying still, the way you might imagine a food you’ve never eaten when you see it on a menu. But we do not know what it really tastes like.

Some of these people will be right about you, because all of us have behaved badly toward other people whom we did not like for one reason or another.

I hope your teeth leave your mouth and run around town biting people and you are blamed and sent to jail.

You can easily think of times when you were horrible, and when I say easily I mean it is very easy to remember these times and hard to stop remembering. They ache in the brain and the body, these shameful memories, like a broken bone that has never quite healed right.

I get sad, when I think of my own wicked acts, although I suppose if I weren’t sad about them it would mean I didn’t care. I’m glad that I care, so I’m a little happy that I’m sad.

As it happens, standing still and blinking is a perfect illustration of a certain principle of philosophy. It’s a paradox, thought up by Zeno. Zeno was an ancient Greek philosopher who ended up being tortured by people who didn’t like his ideas. Nowadays philosophers are hardly ever tortured, because most people ignore them completely, and it’s hard to say which is the worse fate for philosophy and the people who practice it, being tortured or being ignored.

Many humans, for instance, believe in reincarnation, which is the idea that when you die you are reborn as a new person or another animal, and many of the people who believe in reincarnation believe that a human is the highest form, the best thing to be when you are reborn. I have never been convinced of this. I looked at the birds. They did not seem to be thinking I was the highest form, nor has any other creature I’ve ever looked at, and their chirping did not appear to be for my entertainment.

Music is often described as the universal language, a phrase which here means that everybody can understand it, although as with birds, “language” may not be the right word, and who knows if anybody, let alone everybody, can really understand music.

Slavery was more or less brought to an end in America, although not as quickly or apologetically as it should have been, and even after slavery ended, the descendants of slaves have been treated very terribly by many people in many places with much hatred and violence, which, like slavery, may someday come to an end, although also not as quickly or apologetically as any decent person would like.

There is a philosophical idea I have always liked called tzimtzum, which is as tricky to say out loud as it is to think about. Tzimtzum proposes that the world did come from nothing, but that the nothing was made by something, so something made nothing in order for something to come from the nothing, and this may be why we spend most of our lives drifting between nothing and something. Perhaps you find this confusing and might need to pause for a second to read that sentence again, and that is an important part of tzimtzum too. To think about something, you often need to pause first—to make nothing in your mind, just for a second, so there is room for you to think about what it is that has grabbed your attention. To think about something, you need nothing,

It was strange that so clear a thought had come to me out of the blur of something and nothing, but that is often the way of the story of the world.

Happiness, in my experience, is like a bowl of bananas, because if you pay too much attention, it gets gobbled away, but if you forget all about it, either a robber steals it or it ends up rotten mush. It can be tricky to keep one’s happiness intact, and the interference of a supermarket strikes me as only making things trickier.

The first ingredient in my bread was flour made from wheat, a plant I actually had growing in my tiny backyard. A friend had planted it for me as a gift, but only a little bit had sprouted, because I wasn’t much of a gardener and didn’t know how to make it thrive, a word which here means “grow tall and bushy rather than shriveled and dead.” Somewhere someone was a proper farmer, and somewhere was a bigger piece of land—much, much bigger—where people were growing enough wheat to make all these loaves of bread arranged before me, and all the extra loaves that were likely in a refrigerator behind that door marked No Admittance, a phrase which here means that you can’t go in, even though two people in aprons were walking through it at that very moment. And think of all the markets, I thought, super and not super, all over the world with all their loaves of bread. Somewhere was enough land to grow all that wheat, but it was impossible for me to imagine. Field after field of wheat, stretching out as far as my mind could picture them, but how could there be enough room for them, and have there still be space on Earth for scorching deserts and icy mountains and all the places wheat cannot grow? All that land was just for the wheat, and the wheat was just for the flour. My bread had other ingredients, and all the other breads had still more, salts and yeasts and seeds and nuts and chemicals and additives harvested in marshes and picked in groves and cooked up in laboratories and ma...

You do not always know you are happy when you are happy.

It does not matter, the story of what happened at the base of that tree. It has nothing to do with philosophy or with my poisoned breakfast, so I will leave it out. Like kissing, it is perhaps too powerful for words, even one “O” or a person’s name. It can be very powerful to write the name of a person you have kissed or even just someone you wish you had kissed, on a scrap of paper where no one can see, or carved into the trunk of a tree where everyone can. It is even powerful just to write it down in your mind when you are alone, but it still does not matter, I thought to myself, because now I was alone there at the tree.

Telling yourself that something does not matter is one of the loneliest things you can do, because you only say it, of course, about things that matter very much. But often, and this is the lonely part, they only matter to you.

Wow

“Let me tell you a story. A long time ago, there was a merchant selling pears in a marketplace. A traveling monk asked if he could have one, but the merchant refused. The monk was dressed in tattered clothing, and the other market goers felt very sorry for him and began urging the merchant to give one single pear from his abundance. The merchant refused, so finally someone purchased a single pear and gave it to the monk, who gobbled it up, leaving behind a single seed. As the crowd watched, the monk planted the seed in the ground, and within moments it had grown into a pear tree covered in fruit which the monk distributed to the crowd. The pear merchant watched all this in fascination and frustration, and then suddenly noticed that all of his pears were gone. Suspecting the monk of trickery, the merchant turned to confront him but the monk, too, had disappeared.”

This is also in where the mountain meets the moon(?)

Life is like this, and literature, imaginary conversations and true stories mingling like languages in translation.

I enjoy eating eggs, and eggs look so cheery on a breakfast plate that I cannot help but think that eggs enjoy being eaten.