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In the course of solving the following riddle, you will either reveal the terrifying secret at the very core of existence, or go utterly mad in the attempt.

Let's say you have an ax. The kind that you could use, in a pinch, to hack a man's head off. And let's say that very situation comes up and for some very solid reasons you behead a man. On the follow-through, though, the handle of the ax snaps in half in a spray of splinters. So the next day you take it to the ax store down the block and get a new handle, fabricating a story for the guy behind the counter and explaining away the reddish dark stains as barbeque sauce.

Now, that next spring you find in your garage a creature that looks like a cross-bred badger and anaconda. A badgerconda. And so you grab your trusty ax and chop off one of the beast's heads, but in the process the blade of the ax strikes the concrete floor and shatters.

This means another trip to McMillan & Sons Ax Mart. As soon as you get home with your newly-headed ax, though, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year. He's also got a new head attached and it's wearing that unique expression of "you're the man who killed me last Spring" resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.

You brandish your ax. He takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, "that's the same ax that slayed me!"

Is he right?

The next riddle is basically the same, but, we'll see...

You're sailing across the sea in a boat made of wooden planks. The boat is filled with extra wooden planks. Whenever one plank rots, you replace it, throwing the old one overboard. Over the course of the voyage, you replace every single plank in the boat. Is it still the same boat that you departed in?

Oo, an additional idea to the previous question...say if, the pieces of the ship you threw overboard were somehow recovered and rebuilt, which, if either, would be the original ship?

The question arises as to what sort of change happens after a thing is destroyed? When a person dies, one does not say that the person's life has changed. Neither does one go around saying, "Harry just isn't the same sort of guy after he died." Instead, one says that Harry's life has ended. Similarly, when a building is demolished, one does not say that the building 'changes'; one says that it is destroyed. So what sort of events, on the one hand, result in a mere change, and what sort of events, on the other hand, result in a thing's destruction, in the end of its existence?