No Hidden Meanings

Three professionals, an engineer, a psychologist and a theologian, were together on a hunting trip in the Canadian Rockies. They came upon an isolated cabin. Seeking shelter and rest, they knocked on the door but no one answered. The door was unlocked, so they entered, and immediately they saw something quite unusual: in the kitchen, suspended in mid-air by two wires attached to the ceiling beams, was a large pot-bellied stove. “Why would a stove be hanging like that, halfway between the floor and the ceiling,” they asked each other. Soon they agreed: there must be a hidden meaning.

The psychologist said it was obvious to him that the cabin owner elevated his stove because of his isolation from the rest of humanity. “He can curl up under it in the fetal position and experience a return to his mother’s womb,” he said. The engineer saw a different hidden meaning in the phenomenon. “Obviously,” he said, “this man is practicing the laws of thermodynamics.…