The Ships of Theseus

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians    ...    for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. — Plutarch, Vita Thesel The answer of course is that the ship doesn’t exist, that “ship” is an abstraction, a conception, an imaginary tarp thrown across the garden of the real. The answer is that the cheap peasantry of things toils all day in the kingdom of  language, every ship like a casket of words:bulkhead, transom, mast steps