Do you remember your first sip of beer? Terrible! How could anyone like <i>that</i> stuff? But beer, you reflect, is an acquired taste; one gradually… - Douglas Hofstadter

We human beings are macroscopic structures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level. As survival-seeking beings, we are driven to seek efficient explanations that make reference only to entities at our own level. We therefore draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality.

What gives this zeugma its flavor of oddness is that one of the meanings of the verb “restore” that it depends on is “to return something that has been lost”, while the other meaning used is “to make something regain its former, more ideal state”, and although these two senses of the same word are clearly related, they are just as clearly not synonymous.

One of the basic tenets of Zen Buddhism is that there is no way to characterize what Zen is. No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over. It might seem, then, that all efforts to explain Zen are complete wastes of time. But that is not the attitude of Zen masters and students. For instance, Zen koans are a central part of Zen study, verbal though they are. Koans are supposed to be "triggers" which, though they do not contain enough information in themselves to impart enlightenment, may possibly be sufficient to unlock the mechanisms inside one's mind that lead to enlightenment. But in general, the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.