How a 1st Graders’s morbid answer to a simple riddle has stunned the internet

The puzzle reads: “I am the beginning of everything, the end of everywhere. I’m the beginning of eternity, the end of time & space. What am I?”

Often what children say is either silly or funny - but sometimes their response can be too deep and profound for their age. This is what happened when a teacher in California posed a simple riddle to his first-grade students as part of the “puzzle of the week” series.

Stunned by the child’s answer, the teacher took to Twitter to share his experience. (Bret Turner/Twitter)

Bret Turner, a teacher in Albany, California, asked: “I am the beginning of everything, the end of everywhere. I’m the beginning of eternity, the end of time & space. What am I?”

The answer to the question is “e”, but the reply he got from one of his students led to an “awed, somber, reflective hush” across the class.

“Death”, said one of his students.

Stunned by the child’s answer, Turner took to Twitter on Wednesday to share his experience.

“I didn’t want to tell them that actually the answer is the letter e, which just seemed so banal in the moment,” he wrote on Twitter.

His tweet has since gone viral, with more than 101k retweets and 290k likes so far.

“Before I finally revealed the ‘correct’ answer to the riddle, to a largely unimpressed audience, I fielded other guesses that continued along a similarly existential vein,” Turner later tweeted. “There was ‘NOT everything,’ ‘all stuff,’ ‘the end,’ and maybe my favorite, ‘nothingthing.’”

What followed was a rather philosophical debate on Twitter.

Sample some tweets here.