Poison for Breakfast

by Lemony Snicket

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,...