Maybe this is the sort of moment when riddles have an afterglow of their own, a wisdom that illuminates the edges of experience when nothing else can. In a world where half of the villagers always lie and half of them always tell the truth; where the hare never catches the tortoise because the distance between them shrinks be a never collapsing infinity of halves; where the fox can never be left of the same bank of the river as the hen, or the hen on the same bank as the grain, because with perfect regularity the one will consume the other, and nothing you can do will prevent it; in that world, everything is sensible but the premise.
A riddle is a castle built on air, perfectly habitable if you don't look down... And if I accept its existence, then the foundation is set and the impossible castle can be built. The rest is just mortar and stones.
-- p.364, The Rule of Four
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