Life & Wisdom Quote by Bertolt Brecht

A joke shaped like a trap: Brecht’s question sounds like a child’s riddle, then turns into a philosophical audit. The “hole” is a negative space that only exists because something else does. Remove the cheese and you don’t just lose a snack; you lose the conditions that made “the hole” legible in the first place. It’s a neat, slightly cruel way to expose how often we treat absences as if they were independent things - as if scarcity, debt, “crime,” even “public opinion” have lives of their own rather than being carved out by material arrangements.

That’s classic Brecht: defamiliarize the everyday so the audience stops consuming reality passively and starts inspecting it like a stage set. The line carries his Marxist instinct to drag lofty abstractions back to their economic scaffolding. If you can be made to worry about the fate of a hole, you can also be made to worry about the fate of “the market” or “the nation” when the underlying substance changes - and to ask who benefits from pretending those concepts are natural and eternal.

The subtext is pointedly anti-mystical: what we call essence is often just a contour. Context matters here. Brecht wrote in an era of collapsing certainties - empire to republic, boom to crash, fascism to war, exile to Cold War. The question refuses comforting metaphysics and forces a materialist reckoning: when the real thing disappears, the categories built around it don’t float free. They vanish, or get repurposed as propaganda.