The Egg

The Egg

 

When, with no other memory, he had restlessly wandered half his life in the desert and been baked by the sun and had gone without water, without dying, and had wished to die and laid down in the burning sand without succeeding - even after waiting a long time - he began counting his steps in the sand and years later came back to his point of departure, where he found a little eggshell, and he thought: “It would be better to be inside there. But I wonder who laid this egg?” He then retraced his steps to his effort’s hitherto high point, counted them again to a total of 500,429,344 footprints, was annoyed about the first incorrect tallying - or the last - but also already the next. So he counted again, but also this time came up with a difference of three footprints, which he put down to lack of attention on his part and abandoned the counting and decided from now on to just look up at the sky. After he’d been looking at the sky a long time, while still wondering why he wasn’t supposed to eat or sleep or drink - even though he was thirsty and hungry and not dead, and merely wanted to sleep - he started searching for a meaning to his actions, and after 35 years saw a door standing in the desert. How could it actually stand up by itself? He looked in front; he looked behind. He chose the light side and began knocking, but when no one answered he decided that, with his knocking, he would carve an alphabet in the door’s surface. After 35 years he had knocked an alphabet into the door with his knuckles, but no one answered or told him anything on the strength of the letters he had invented - no sudden rings around letters, no sudden color differences that emerged out of nothingness - so he opened the door himself and began carving numbers into the other, dark side with his knuckles. When he’d finished all the numbers up to 9, he came to 0 and again opened the door and went around to the other side, but he had attracted neither any god nor any person with his work. “Fine,” he thought. “So no one opens his door in the desert. That was all I wanted to know.”

                 The man died, but future generations found great meaning in the mystery of this person whom they called “God”, and were infinitely happy about this evidence of the divine. Heavily armed guards were stationed around the door in the desert, for mortals want to both protect and attack the divine that does not appear divine if it doesn’t seem to need being closely protected and isn’t to a certain degree dangerous. And people traveled to Hannibal’s Door in the Desert on long personal enlightenment pilgrimages that, because of the redeeming suffering, were supposed to bring about a certain experiencing of God, and everyone filled his or her life with meaning and content and suffering and the story about him, and a kind of testament was written by the first generations after the man, generations whose stories about the man were believed by the generations to follow, even though they were lies. It was said of the man that he must have had a great love of life to have been able to bear a long life throughout a long life, that his tireless course was the victory of love over nature and not of a will to live, that he had found the greatest importance in communicating to posterity and leaving behind a testimonial to its existence, to love’s existence. For the first descendants had given a slightly red color to the letters on the light side of the door that together spelled the world “love”, but it was definitely supposed to be the man who had done it, had colored these letters with his red tears - according to the testaments - yet the man hadn’t wept blood, had he? And many generations after his death people had already long ago implemented the use of his letters and numbers - could not bear any form of communication but this - and people were killed for contradicting the man, though he had never said anything and therefore couldn’t be contradicted, had not even hoped there was anyone in this world to be found other than himself, and had been happily free of having to assign life value.

                 Only much later did people follow in his footsteps and lay cement in them so persevering people could follow the same meaningless path back and forth and around this desert that the man in his progress had probably enlarged, indeed created, and finally the eggshell was found and it was concluded that, “the man was not a man at all, nor was he any god, but simply an animal – our own origins.” Suddenly it was forbidden to call the man “God” anymore, since it was now considered degrading for man; those who believed in Him and his gospel - in the way it had been presented out of thin air by the first generations – were killed, and since no one wished to die, people maintained their faith in secret, and later, not at all. Then it became interesting to research the inner nature and characteristics and origins of this eggshell, and find out what animal the man had been, because now there was a suitable distance to those who previously had called him “God”, so that it was no longer embarrassing, but practically beautiful, since it revealed something about man’s primitive and romantic forefathers. The egg was recreated by using material from the old egg; it was fertilized using the most modern methods and finally, one day, mankind’s genesis was ready to be hatched.

“It’s the Devil,” said the scientists, when a little, hot-tempered, demented creature stepped out of the shell. “However, in those days one merely lacked the means of designating  how it could be possible for an entire species - that knew no other than itself - to describe itself so negatively, provided that the species wants to survive or that nature forces it to do so, or that it actually wants to attribute to itself a certain sense of ethics. Future generations, too, will be frothing at the mouth to judge our work, as to the extent to which we discovered the genesis or created something completely new. They will put forth viewpoints and interpretations, perform trials with techniques unknown to us, reveal our lack of knowledge, practically attribute to us a certain romantic naivety or even call our blindness diabolical. If it weren’t precisely for the fact that this is the only thing we know with certainty, we’d already be able to make use of this future judgment, but it dissolves like a truth that has been watered down in a practically endless series of viewpoints that are all equally valid and only true because people at a given time believe it.”

“But I am the judgment of the future, even though in a certain sense I’ve always remained the same,” screamed the little devil, and quick as a wink reproduced an enormous quantity of eggs that he hid all over the world.

Naturally there was now a desire to create growth and employment by giving people advanced training in the collection of these eggs so they could be destroyed safely and scientifically. But it was discovered that a single glance at one of the eggs resulted in an immediate hatching, which in turn led to a new egg and hatchings of both killers and freaks, who for the time being are not allowed for use in the entertainment industry. Therefore man has been trained to close his eyes when he searches, making the work much slower, yet the exquisite hope exists: that the evolution of a given future will have developed the human sense of smell to the point of being able to shun these eggs or to do nothing other than find them with the greatest of ease, helped by the sense of smell - naturally with the purpose of calling this quest The Meaning of Life, not merely another step towards extinction, not just another bit of drama enhanced by man with such gravity that only future generations will be able to tolerate a lesser degree of compassion or ridicule without seriously placing themselves on a par with the previous.