Letter to Two Strangers

Archer,
your arrows will not pierce the heart of death.
Because…?
I don’t know whether it has a heart.
But to reach it,
if it had one,
they would first
have to cover half the way to it.
And before that, half of the half.
And so on, right back to the start of their way.

Swordsman,
your sword cannot solve the problem of Gordius.
Because…?
The knot was meant to be untangled,
not cut through.

And somewhere outside all this
the beautiful secrets of life lie hidden.

The rest is mathematics…
And the other rest is other things…
… and the sphinx, for certain, is unbendingly silent…