It's hard to argue that word problems, or puzzles, used as they are in our schools as disposable exercises, could be lived with over time, and seen to have inexhaustible levels of meaning (as a parable in the religious sense), particularly poetic meaning about the depths of human experience. There is certainly the element of the indescribable involved in mathematical concepts, particularly those that deal with infinity, or with entities that exist perhaps only as mental images. Although word problems do reflect historical situations of their authors, is it stretching the metaphor to claim that word problems mediate the ultimate reaches of the reality of man? That they involve eschatological crisis, or that they express the drama between human beings and God?