Donut holes

It is easy to interrogate the human condition with people’s responses to the standard set of big questions: Who are we? Do we have a purpose? Do Tar Heels have a right to exist? 

But let’s keep in mind that this is a college campus. The big questions, as that weird alternative kid who lives down the hall from you and only listens to bands with a vowel to consonant ratio of one to fifteen will be quick to remind you, are far too mainstream to tell us anything interesting about life anymore. Let’s assume he’s right. Screw the big questions. Let’s seek truth in trivialities. Here, then, is a decidedly small question I posed to anyone brave or foolish enough to respond: how do you feel about the holes in doughnuts? 

My first victim respondent expressed the view that the hole in a doughnut is a sort of gastronomical keystone: as he memorably put it, “the hole makes the ‘nut.” There’s certainly a frank poetry to that response, as well as a sort of wisdom. Debussy called music “the space between the notes…the dividing of the tones,” a sentiment famously reiterated by Miles Davis, and easily affirmed by anyone who has ever appreciated the cadence of a good song. This idea is reminiscent of a relatively little known theological tradition known as apophatic theology that seeks to define the divine not in positive, descriptive terms, but in negative, exclusionary ones: describing not what God is, but instead what it explicitly isn’t. A good apophatic theologian understands well the idea that truth and beauty are defined by absence, that a room is made to seem brighter if one corner is in shadow. This idea applies rather well to the doughnut: as a baked good and as a cultural icon, it is defined by its hole, and so to fill it in would be to strip it of its significance as both food and symbol. 

I also received a more grounded, albeit tongue-in-cheek opinion: that the holes in doughnuts are merely the product of corporate America’s relentless greed and reluctance to utilize any more dough than is absolutely necessary to keep the gluttonous masses worshipping at the altar of consumerism. 

I should also probably mention here that perhaps the truest, or at least the most literal, meaning behind the hole in a doughnut is simply to promote even cooking. There’s a practicality to these kinds of responses that I think is worth learning from: beyond all the layers of metaphor and cultural significance, the hole in a doughnut, is, before anything else, simply a hole in a doughnut. In order to find meaning in small things, the small things have to exist. And often, they exist thanks to capitalism. C’est la vie.

A third respondent launched almost worryingly promptly into a story involving a friend, a glazed doughnut, and certain acts that are perhaps best left to the imagination of the reader. I suppose this, too, is a necessary part of the human condition, whether we in our ivory towers approve or not. Onward.

Another respondent pointed out that the doughnut would be rather difficult to grip without its hole. As we are all no doubt aware, a proper doughnut should be downright slippery with glaze, such that without the hole, it would be quite difficult to eat. Just as there’s a beauty to the thought of my future readers carefully turning over the Platonic ideal of a doughnut hole in their mind and flipping through possible ascribed meanings like vellum pages in a fine leather-bound book, there is a franker beauty to the image of the swimmer down the hall from me hungrily tearing into a clutched doughnut after a trying practice without care for anything but its heavenly taste. 

My final respondent seemed a bit bemused by all this talk of exploring the human condition through people's opinions on doughnut holes. In her view, politely but firmly expressed, doughnut holes are too trivial to truly be worth analyzing. I would venture to say that she was the type to strive for big things, and therefore the type to entertain only big questions. 

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