Poison for Breakfast

by Lemony Snicket

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.

Involuntary noises are my least favorite kind of noise I can make. If I’m going to sound foolish I would at least like to have done it on purpose.

There are some librarians so trustworthy and so interesting that you know any book they recommend will be worth your time, and I didn’t even wait until I had walked home to start the book she had given me.

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.

Perhaps she was too busy dying, which is, from the look of it, very exhausting work.

It was a little curious to be hurrying to the tea shop, because drinking tea is usually the opposite of hurrying. Tea is difficult to drink quickly, because it is hot and needs time to steep, and so a cup of tea forces you to slow down and think as you wait for it to cool and become more flavorful. I was hurrying to get somewhere where I usually slowed down.

Over the years I’ve learned to compare almost anything to almost anything else. I can compare the pencil I am using to write these words (and these words, and these and these) to my own life, because it is sometimes sharp and sometimes dull, and because it is getting shorter and shorter the more I use it, and because even when I try to erase things you can still see the marks they left behind. I can compare my mother to an apple, because she spent some of her early days in a tree, and because I would like her less if she were baked and sprinkled with cinnamon. I can compare sadness to an automobile, because they can both run me over, and I can compare happiness to an aardvark, because they’re both unusual to see early in the morning, and I can compare the various teas for sale at Incomparable Tea to all sorts of things, which means they’re not really incomparable. There’s a tea that tastes like freshly cut grass, and a tea that has a scent like campfire smoke. There is a tea that, when brewing in hot water, opens up like a flower, and one that dissolves into little threads like a lousy sweater. There are teas the color of a dying fern and an angry tree and a thrilling storm and dung.

It has never interested me much to learn the names of different birds, because, of course, you are not really learning their names at all, just names we call them. When a person tells you their name, they are telling you what they want to be called, but a goose or a sparrow, for instance, would likely be confused if they learned we were calling them these things. “Red-breasted robin?" a red-breasted robin might repeat in astonishment. “That’s not my name. And why are you focusing on my breast? That’s inappropriate.”

The Europeans are sometimes described as “discovering America,” which is confusing, because of course there were already people living there, so it would be as if I walked into your house and said I discovered it, simply because I hadn’t been there before. In history, such visitors are often referred to as “pioneers,” but in this situation you would probably be more likely to call me a burglar.

Everything that happens to you happens to you. Often boring, sometimes exhausting, and occasionally thrilling, every moment of life is unskippable.

They weren’t quite thoughts, just little scraps of thinking,

You do not always know you are happy when you are happy. Sometimes you can’t really tell when you are happy until it is over and you are thinking about it later.

I wasn’t dead and I wasn’t seriously injured. I was just sore and embarrassed, which is something that often happens when you are clumsy.

The man talking to me was wearing a suit the color of a day threatening rain, though his smile was quite sunny.

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

The last way eggs can be prepared is boiled, and the trick to preparing a boiled egg is to remember that you will die. Boil water in a pot, and this is the world. Put an egg in the pot, and this is you. Prick it with a pin first, but do not worry, because the egg will not remember this, just as you do not remember your life before you were in the world. The hole made by the pin keeps the egg from cracking under pressure, which some eggs—and some people—occasionally do. Once the egg is in the pot of boiling water, you must watch over it holding a slotted spoon. You are the figure of Death. The egg does not know how long it will be in the world, before the great spoon of Death will lift it away. Perhaps it will be a long time, because someone wants a hard-boiled egg, which is good at a picnic or to startle someone by tossing it at them. Or perhaps it will be a short time, three minutes perhaps, and enjoyed in an egg cup, a phrase for a cup which holds an egg. You can eat it with a tiny spoon, alongside a sliced pear, a piece of toast with goat’s-milk cheese, and a cup of tea with honey, and enjoy all this while reading, never knowing if it is your last breakfast, if today is the day you will be spooned out of the world, but hoping that you, like the egg, are perfectly prepared.

Just to walk inside one, and to breathe in a room where so much literature has been gathered, is such a powerful feeling that it often brings a tear to my eye, although that could also be my mild allergy to dust.

As someone who writes books, this always gives me hope. Some book of mine—this book of philosophy, for example—may sit ignored and lonely on a high shelf, but then someday a reader will walk into a library and spot the spine of the book they have been waiting for, and they will pluck my book off the shelf and use it to stand on, to reach the book they are excited to read.

A proper library has at least one fantastic librarian, preferably more than one, so if the fantastic librarian goes out to lunch or falls into a tar pit, there will be a spare.

A fantastic librarian knows more about what you are looking for than you do, the way a cookie in a bakery knows you want to eat it before you even know it is out of the oven, and like a good cookie, a fantastic librarian doesn’t show off about it, just waits silently for you to open your mouth.

As a writer, my imagination was my most important tool, even more important than a pencil or a scrap of paper. Even before I could write, I could imagine things, but right now my imagination seemed useless, in the face of such truly enormous suffering.

My handwriting has often been described, by various adults who believed it was their job to improve me, as “unclear,” and it is true it drifts here and there, into its own shapes and loops, as if the letters are wandering around town, instead of marching in a straight line.

We must try, all of us, a lot of the time, our best, and we must keep trying. We do not understand anything but we should try our best to understand each other. We should swim and walk in parks, thinking. We should watch movies and think about what might happen. We should buy food and think about where it comes from, and we should listen to music and wonder what it means. We should have conversations, real and imaginary, with translators handy so that everybody might understand everything we say. We may feel native to where we are, or feel displaced, or both, the way someone going on a journey is also a stranger in town, but nevertheless we should keep reading. We must read mysterious literature, and be as bewildered by it as we are by the world, and we should write down our ideas, turning our stories, as if by magic, into literature.

Many years ago, I was crying very hard on a bench outside. I was crying because there was someone I would never really see again. A man happened by whom I knew—not a friend, not even an associate. Truthfully, I had always thought he was something of an oaf. He was all dressed up in a fancy suit, and he was in a hurry. It is very embarrassing to cry when other people can see you, but it is something we all do eventually. The man saw me, and I saw him see me. I did not know where he was going, and he did not know why I was crying. He did not keep hurrying, which would have embarrassed me, and he did not give me a big hug and tell me everything was going to be all right, which would have made me cry harder. He stopped and sat next to me and did not speak a word. He did not say anything at all, and I could not tell you why it was the most perfect thing to do. It was a terrible time for me, but it was, perhaps, his finest hour.