Post #191: Of Eggs and Men

27 December 2025

“Having an egg brought to him, Columbus placed it on the table saying, ‘Gentlemen, I lay a wager with any of you, that you cannot make this egg stand up as I will, the way it is, without any further help.’ They all tried, and no one succeeded. When the egg came round to Columbus, he beat it down on the table and thereby fixed it in place, having crushed a little of one end.”

—Girolamo Benzoni, History of the New World (1565), Book 1

     A raw egg must guard itself with the greatest care, since the slightest crack may suffice for its vitality to drain right out. But what if an egg has been cooked first—perhaps not to hardness, but boiled in the steams of life to some measure of firmness? Then the shell might even be cracked all around, as we commonly do before peeling, and yet hold together unless pulled off.

     Do we not all yearn, as part of our human condition (rather than mere personal vanity), to be flawless exemplars, unblemished eggs so to speak, polished to perfection and shining before all the world? Yet how is it possible to go through life so unscathed, given the frailty of our shells! The inevitable cracks may not be very attractive to the eye, nor comfortable for the egg, but it may come as a consoling surprise to discover that despite the inevitable damage along the rocky road of life, “the whole catastrophe” (as Zorba the Greek called it) can still hold together tolerably well, not just with sundry fissures, but after outright breakages too.

     Perhaps there is wisdom to be found in being thus broken; perhaps it fosters humility and brings the elusive meaning of no-self more within our reach. Perhaps too the cracks are how the light gets in, as I have quoted Leonard Cohen before (#9). Alas, this does not mean that the broken parts, or the tender insides, will stop hurting…

     The Columbus anecdote—which, if it ever happened, the great man had borrowed from another: the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, who used it in 1418 during heated competition for the construction of the Duomo in Florence—carried a rather different meaning, I realize. But consider: the unblemished egg could not be made to stand by any means other than propping it up; not so the bruised and broken one, which could hold up by itself.

     But wait, is it true that damaged eggs require less support? Surely not: needing others is a human universal—as no damaged egg could fail to understand. Only the unblemished ones might imagine that their perfection puts them above such dependencies, and perhaps that is the central fault with their state of being, despite all the specious luster. Broken eggs may stand apart from others, out of prudence, perhaps, or from shame; but they could hardly consider it the part of wisdom to shun assistance.

     “I stay away because I fear you would not want me with you” is a very different proposition from the stand-offish airs that pride and presumed superiority like to give themselves in the world, though much hidden insecurity lurks behind the shiniest as well as the shabbiest of facades. (Groucho Marx’s bon mot comes to mind: I would never join a club that would have me for a member.) Of course the unbroken ones, if any such could be found, ought not to be judged too severely either: they have reason enough for their conceits. The very mirror provides the evidence, or so it must look to them. But mirrors crack and break too, or become dull with wear, and no egg has ever been known to go unbroken all the way to the grave. Nor, if one could get that far fully intact, which is hardly conceivable, would it make the inescapable leave-taking any easier.

     Beauty contests are inevitable, given how we are constituted, and by no means the worst feature of our human ways. It is only when we take the lovely blossoms for something they are not, and can never be, namely lasting possessions rather than temporary gifts, that they turn against us and become poisonous weeds or flowers of evil.

     To shine when one can is neither wrong nor otherwise objectionable. The question is what happens when the light fades, the skin sags, and the crinkles turn into crevices. It is not a pretty process for anyone, whether in the strict sense of ageing by the years, or at the deeper level of accumulating more and more scar tissue. Then again, we may hope that it is not quite as desperate as it must appear from the perspective of the (relatively) unblemished. The very years teach acceptance at last.

     Ageing, sickness, and death catch up with everyone—we don’t need the Buddhists to tell us that, only perhaps to keep reminding us. Get born, get hurt, get old, and die. So it goes. How to make our peace with this doleful dimension of life may be the greatest challenge of all. And there we might take heart from the example of the cracked egg, even if its crushed countenance can hardly be what anyone would wish for in life. As Viktor Frankl liked to insist, this strange but fascinating, ever-passing show is not only about what we want from life, but just as much, or more, about what life asks of us.