Mystery
Item No. 21
“Specifications for mystery, seems like that’s rather self-defeating, isn’t it?”We list Mystery in The Last Catalog as our ability to grapple with mystery seems to diminish by the day.
This has been happening for some time. Not to get too weighty right here at the start, but, in some way or another, since, basically, the “Age of Reason,” we’ve been trying to explain everything around us rationally.
What is it? What is mystery? Officially, it is anything that is kept as a secret in the unknown's space. It is what exists in the metaphysical space where we’re just not sure exactly how to explain whatever is there. It's like mystery is just around the corner in the space of what we might know, if we go looking, but when we go looking, we still uncover more hidden truths there. It is where we find the remnants of such invisible truths, abstractions, and more abstruseness. It is where all the difficult to explain things live in their obscure, arcane, esoteric, recondite, complex and incomprehensible ways. It's where we scratch our heads and wonder about the things we wish we could explain, but can’t seem to understand very well.
Well, at least well enough to explain to ourselves (or anyone else) anyway.
Some might say it is the space of concepts like souls and spirits, the supernatural, even. And its definitely at the heart of a great detective story.
It is where a detective lives. Aiming to uncover those things as yet beyond data and knowledge, but still trying to explain them there.
How did it land in the catalog?
Well, even though truths remain hidden, and we live in a big as yet unexplained universe, we continue to convince ourselves that our methods might explain it all. Explanation is mystery’s primary predator. Reason also nips at its livelihood now.
We love naming things, explaining them, and then we move on as if it's all explainable. Sustained attention is required to sit with an unanswered question without reaching immediately for resolution.
But we don’t have patience for that.
Reason and explanation, by the way, are good things. Let’s be really clear about that. We can get ourselves into a bit of trouble, or even a lot of trouble, when we don’t pay attention to the truths that we do uncover.
It's just that we don’t live in an either or universe, do we? So it's not either an answer or the death of an answer.
It's both.
But, mystery is here, in the catalog, as it does indeed seem to disappear under the weight of knowing everything. The habitat of sustained unknowing is being lost, we think. It is dwindling away a little at a time.
We list mystery in the catalog to honor it before it completely disappears under the weight of all of our certainties.
As humans, we used to find mystery everywhere. We just knew a little about things in spite of it all and humbly admitted it. There was a time when the gap between what we knew and what existed beyond what we knew was a place to go exploring. Mystery was, well, mysterious. Maybe then we realized we might not describe everything, or account for, label, and resolve it all. We allowed space for wonder where imagination might still thrive. We were willing to profess a belief in the invisible.
The thing is that mystery seems to be unbothered by our progress, even though as humans we seem to want it to disappear. That is why we’re entering it here.
The price of the loss of mystery seems the loss of the reaching. Losing confusion, deep questions, fear, wonder. Our capacity to remain unresolved. “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He, to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead—his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it is with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”― Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies.
Other Specifications:
Specifications for mystery? Seems like that's rather self-defeating, isn't it? To specify mystery is to lose it. Thus, again, its entry here. That said, let’s keep going, keep specifying. We’re after explanations and specifications these days after all…. We, the creators of this catalog are not immune to it!
If we must specify further though…
Mystery is unanswered questions that we love wrestling with. An interest to peer beneath what might be explained. Leaving room for things like the mystery of the natural world. (That we’re alive at all.) The mystery of other people. That another person's interior life is completely inaccessible to us. Always. Even in long friendships or in enduring marriages. And especially in strangers. The mystery of our origin. Why do we exist? Why there is something rather than nothing? See Catalog entry: Nothing.
What is the meaning of life?