Poison for Breakfast

by Lemony Snicket

It is almost as if enormous philosophical questions are not designed to be answered at all, but just to make you think.

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.

In my favorite part, a girl begins thinking about the world, in the hopes of solving the mystery around her, and she closes her eyes and imagines herself in a dark cave, on a path taking her deeper and deeper inside, which is how investigating a mystery can feel. When she can imagine herself going no further, she rounds a corner and sees, in the cave, a tiger, sitting on a blanket. The tiger doesn’t say a word, and she wonders if this tiger is the source of the mysterious world in which she is living. God? she thinks to herself, and then wonders, Then who made the blanket? The first time I read this book I was quite young, and when I reached the sentence Then who made the blanket? I blinked, and the girl and the tiger and the cave all vanished. I was no longer in the world of the book, which had changed the landscape around me. I was in the world I was in, reading in bed, one hand holding the book and the other clutching my bedcovers. I looked down, away from the sentence Then who made the blanket? and looked at my blanket and wondered who made it. And that moment, for the first time I can remember, I understood that I knew nothing, that all the tiny things in my mind were just little tricks, as far from truth and wisdom as vinegar is from the question of whether the chicken or the egg came first. I knew nothing at all, from who made the blanket which was lying over me to why I was sneaking out in the mornings to give a secret breakfast to the birds by the water. In short,...

Nobody knows anything at all. We have no idea what is happening. We are all bewildered. Someone may say that they understand something, to ourselves or to others, but they are wrong, or guessing, or making it up.

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.

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.