A man without eyes saw plums on a tree.
He did not leave plums on the tree, yet he did not take plums either.
How can this be?

I get it: A man with one eye is "a man without eyes", and if he eats one plum out of two, then he neither leaves plums nor takes them. In any American courtroom this would be perjury. If I told the judge "I did not have meetings with the accused before I approved his appointment", and it was then revealed that I had met with him one time prior to the approval, the judge would give me a chance to hone my powers of equivocation in the penitentiary. Lets improve on that. 

"A man with no eyes" is a blind man. He "saw" plums in his imagination, since he had known since his youth that a plum tree grew there. But unbeknownst to the blind man, the plums had fallen off in the previous season. So when he groped for the plums, he found none. He went away disappointed, having neither left one or more plums on the tree, nor taken one or more of them.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited on May 10, 2005, 1:27 pm

Posted by Penny on 2005-05-10 13:20:41