Humpty Dumpty

How much do you know about nursery rhyme characters? 

I didn’t grow up with Mother Goose where the rhyme about Humpty Dumpty was published at least since 1803.  I grew up with Den Store Bastian; just look it up even if you don’t understand it – the cover drawing is enough to send little kids off screaming.  That means that I was introduced to Humpty Dumpty as an adult and, true to form, I have always wondered “What is that all about?”

I checked out the Wikipedia article on this famed character.  I didn’t know that it is not only the king’s horses and men who are utterly useless at repairing Humpty.  He is over the years attended to by no less than 360 other men, doctors, and wrights.  Alas, also to no avail.  And did you know he originally wasn’t an egg-man?  Supposedly, Lewis Carrol wrote Humpty into an egg-like character in 1872.  (But it fits nicely with the general impossibility of repairing him.)

The Wikipedia article has many theories about what this nursery rhyme referred to – from Richard III to a cannon.  As history has many instances of “things of which we must speak that cannot be spoken”; that a nursery rhyme should be a coded reference to something political is quite believable.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

The story I tell myself about Humpty Dumpty is quite different:

It is one where little Humpty didn’t really fit in.  He learned to protect himself by building up a shell around his authentic self to appear normal.

Whatever his interests were, they were not considered appropriate for a little boy, so he learned to appear interested in little boy stuff.  While he might have made an excellent humanist of some kind, this was not considered a real education in his family, so he got a real education in the hope that it would make his parents proud.  He did have special talents that could be applied in the context of the jobs that his real education made him eligible for, but he never understood that these were special talents, and that made him a little impatient when others didn’t understand what he was talking about.  That, in return, exacerbated that he was seen as odd.

So, for all that he had done what was expected of a normal good boy, he still didn’t really belong. The popular kids didn’t invite him to their table because “there is nothing as annoying as people who can’t take a hint”  and he was not very good with the coded talk – neither understanding it, nor communicating in more indirect language.

His shell grew a little thicker for every time his awkwardness was the fodder for gossip, disdain, or ridicule.  Eventually, his shell was so thick that even he didn’t quite know what was inside.  And this was for a long time how he lived his life: as a balancing act between what he no longer remembered and what he didn’t quite understand.

And then one day, Humpty fell off the wall on which he had been balancing.  He had sat down because he was so utterly tired of something he couldn’t put his finger on.  A hard wind blew through – the Universe delivered a proverbial 2 by 4 – and down he came, cracking open the shell that he had gradually built up to protect himself from the taunts and abuse.

For the first time in his adult life, Humpty could see what was inside the shell and that it didn’t match the outside.  He remembered some of the dreams and joys he had had before he had locked away his true self.  He sensed the air moving, the scent of the flowers, the birds singing, the warmth of the sun… in ways he hadn’t taken them in for years.

But as he lay there wondering and remembering, all the king’s men came rushing in and tried to fix him.  “Oh no, Humpty,” they cried, “you really do not want to wear purple pants.”  “What do you mean, that you want to play the trumpet for a living?” they said, “you have always been so good at applied statistics.”  And for all that they tried to get good old (odd and slightly ridiculous) Humpty back, he didn’t want to put his shell on again.

And that is why “Threescore men and threescore more, Cannot place Humpty dumpty as he was before.”

No effing way was Humpty going back.

I am meeting so many brave souls and lovely people who don’t “fit in”.  I already wrote about some of them in a previous piece.

But writing this, it struck me that many so-called normal people probably are also tired of just “fitting in”; of living lives dictated by the goals of others; living out their parents’ dreams; fitting into some societal norms for what success is or should be and experience disdain if they dare walk to a different drummer.

Or perhaps they have internalized the “norm” so much that they heap the disdain on themselves, not even needing anybody else to tell them that they are not good enough?

If the wall is between “appearing normal” and genuine, perhaps we should tear down that wall.  How would people learn to be genuine if they have never been able to look over the wall and see what it looks like?