Humpty Dumpty: After the Fall

My wife is on some kind of weird diet recently which requires her to eat lots of hard-boiled egg whites every day but no yolks, so she always leaves the yolks for me. Often as I'm about to leave the house, she'll say, "Wait! Eat all the egg yolks before you go so I can wash the dish." Today it occurred to me that this makes me like Patrick in the William Alizio story (see "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess me name"), who has to eat all the Hidden Treasures before he, Tim, and William can leave. In the story, "Hidden Treasures" are a sugary breakfast cereal, but in The Hobbit, egg yolks are called hidden treasures:

A box without hinges, key, or lid,
Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

I've been eating "hidden treasures" for my wife for a couple of weeks now but never made that connection until today.

This afternoon I visited a small used bookstore in Taichung with an even smaller foreign-language section, but I nevertheless hit the jackpot. I snapped up several dirt-cheap volumes of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Villon, some in French, others translated. I was about to leave with my loot but then thought that I might as well give the children's section a once-over and see if there was anything suitable for my school's library. That's when I saw this:

Funny that the author's name is Dan, which is the Chinese word for "egg."

Why does Humpty get up on the wall in the first place? This book makes the obvious connection, which I had nevertheless never thought of: Humpty is, in his inner nature and potential, a bird, and therefore longs to be high up:

Somehow -- it is never really explained -- Humpty survives the fall and is put back together again.

The incident leaves him with a fear of heights, though -- which is illustrated with, of all things, a picture of supermarket shelves full of sugary breakfast cereal.

He's afraid to climb the ladder to get the sugary cereals, so he has to content himself with the bland grown-up cereals on the lower shelves. One of these is called, interestingly, Leaves. Gray leaves, though, not the fiery ones of my own Humpty poem.

Humpty takes up the hobby of making paper airplanes and little model birds. When one of these lands on top of the wall, he has to face his fear and climb back up there, which he does. There, on top of the wall, Humpty starts to crack.

And then bursts out of his shell, a fully fledged adult bird.

Why does he emerge from the egg all ready to fly, rather than as a helpless hatchling? It is never explained in the book, just as it is never explained how he could possibly have survived his fall. In terms of symbolism, though, I think we have to conclude that it is because of the time he spent climbing walls when he was an egg. He entered the next stage of his life with that experience already behind him.

Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through his diligence and obedience than another, he will have so much the advantage in the world to come (D&C 130:18-19).

This ties in with something else I've been dwelling on recently as part of my Rosary meditations: the legend of the Visitation as recorded by Luke. In Luke's story, the mother of Jesus is related to the mother of John the Baptist and visits her while Jesus and John are both in the womb, and the fetal John somehow recognizes the fetal Jesus and jumps for joy. Taken literally, it's a fanciful story, as fanciful as that of an egg climbing a wall. I believe what happened is that Jesus told his disciples that one of the reasons John had been able to identify him as the Messiah was that the two of them had already met, before either of them was born. He was referring either to the spirit pre-existence or to past incarnations, but the story was misunderstood and eventually evolved into the form preserved by Luke.

Ever since coming up with this interpretation, I've associated the Visitation story with the phrase "The World is Bound by Secret Knots," which is the title of a Noe Venable album I used to listen to a lot. As I was writing the above paragraph just now, another phrase that came to mind was Elective Affinities, the title of a Goethe novel I've never read. I had a vague inkling of a memory that I'd once seen a copy of Elective Affinities with an egg on the cover, which led me to do an image search. It turns out that Elective Affinities is also the title of a Magritte painting. Perhaps that's what I was remembering, or perhaps some publisher once used the Magritte as cover art for the Goethe. In any case, the Magritte relates directly to After the Fall, as it depicts an egg trying prematurely to be a bird:

The surprise ending of After the Fall, where the transformed Humpty flies off into the sky, also reminds me of the ending of Goethe's Faust, where Faust, despite having literally sold his soul to the devil, unexpectedly ascends to Heaven at the end, because "Whoever strives with all his might / We are allowed to save." Since the Simon and Garfunkel album Bookends has recently come up ("Crescent waxing"), After the Fall also has a lot in common with one of the songs from that album, "Save the Life of My Child":

It's strange that I haven't thought of it at all as I've been making all these posts about Humpty Dumpty, but in 2020 or thereabouts I suddenly became very interested in climbing walls. Almost every night I would go out very late, and instead of just doing my usual night hike, I would find brick walls, climb them, and walk around on top of them, sometimes jumping from one wall to another, which was kind of a stupid thing to do if you think about it. Inevitably, I ended up having a "great fall" and having to limp all the way home with a sprained ankle. And that's why to this day I eat only Granola Harvest and Sad Clown cereal instead of the Hidden Treasures I used to enjoy. (That's a joke. I don't eat cereal at all. The rest of the story is true, though.)