2.7 Humpty Dumpty's Wall
A narrow ledge from which an egg explains the world, until gravity has the last word
Introduction
Alice finds Humpty Dumpty perched on a wall so narrow she cannot imagine how he keeps his balance, and he cannot imagine why she’s worried about it. From this precarious lectern he holds forth on poetry, birthdays, neckties, and — most memorably — the wages he pays his harder-working words. The wall itself never appears in the nursery rhyme everyone is quietly remembering, but it is the whole stage of the scene: a thin line between confident exposition and the obvious catastrophe waiting below.