In Praise of Mystery
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The English language has many glories, dished from the stone soup created by Danes, Angles, Saxons, Africans, and Romans. I’m partial to the Danish -gg- legacy: eggs, foggy, Wigglesworth. But my favorite word is Latinate: mystery.
A melange of vowels, liquids, and sibilants—not a plosive in sight—“mystery” is a beautiful word just in its sound and orthography, and its meanings even more so. From the time I was a little girl, I loved the mystery genre of books: Nancy Drew, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Even now I’m drawn to paperbacks with illustrations of cobble streets, fog, and English lamplights.
This is just aesthetics, an inborn proclivity such as liking the color red more than green. But there’s more to mystery than atmosphere and book genre. I first thought deeply about it when I was a college student studying poetry. When I was a teenager I tended toward a kind of ecstatic oblivion, getting high, putting on huge headphones, and listening for hours to Nights in White Satin and other head music. When I became a Christian at age 16, I put that away, gratefully, and came to appreciate the beauty of clarity. I saw how sinking oneself in that kind of vague but powerful emotion could drain you of energy, truthfulness, and virtue. And I lost patience with those who preferred to hold vague unsubstantiated notions about life, actually preferring not to examine their beliefs, maybe because nailing them down might require commitment and narrow their ability to pick at the buffet of life.
When I became an agnostic at age 19, one of the first things I did was to abandon my practical, help-the-world major of economics and become the English major I was at heart. Still critical of the world and a devotee of clarity, I loved Jane Eyre and hated Madame Bovary. But the first crack in my armor came while studying poetry with a textbook called Western Wind. This text/anthology became my bedside companion for years to come; I’ve probably spent more time reading it than any other book I’ve owned. In one section, the author, John Frederick Nims, discusses two lines of poetry by William Blake. The two lines are:
The Son of Morn in weary Night’s decline,
The lost traveller’s dream under the hill.
About these two lines Nims says something quite profound. Without the rest of the poem, we can’t really know what these lines mean. And yet despite the complete lack of context and, in effect, meaning, we are deeply moved by these lines. They are beautiful, and heavy with meaning that we feel even if we can’t think it.
How does that happen? The individual words are somewhat archetypal—son, night, dream—but not extremely so. “The lost traveller’s dream under the hill” is fairly nonsensical and yet doesn’t feel so. It feels evocative, sad, nostalgic. There’s word choice and there’s rhythm, but in the end these dark shapes on paper translate to sounds in our minds, then images in our heads, concepts and feelings, that somehow, you feel, they shouldn’t be able to. It’s a mystery.
I started thinking more about this in the year or so after Jay and I got married. I had read about the role that some artists thought dreams and the subconscious played in their artwork, but tended to pooh-pooh it. (As a lifelong non-artist, I was uniquely unqualified to do so, but when did that ever stop me?) Then shortly after getting married, something new started to happen. At night when I would start to fall asleep, in that woozy half-conscious state, full-blown works of art would appear in my mind’s eye. This happened time and again for a good year or so, and each time I was amazed. These weren’t images of famous works that I had seen somewhere else; they were coming from my own mind. It kind of opened me up in a way, made me see that there’s so much more there than we experience most of the time.
I thought of mystery again while reading the novel Atonement a few years ago. There’s a scene in which the young Briony sits in her room and again and again moves her finger or arm. She can’t understand how she can make that happen. She thinks about moving her finger, thinks, thinks, thinks, doesn’t do it, considers it, thinks, considers, but then does—and the finger moves. I used to do this very same thing as a child. I freaked myself out! Just as I’d stare at a mirror and almost faint thinking about the relationship between that image and the mind that was staring at it. Craziness.
This mystery of consciousness and will is just a part of the greater mystery of our entire existence. And the question of God trumps all. Believers often use the famous watch analogy to try to prove the necessity of God’s existence, but this has always seemed like the absolutely worst argument to me. You may know the analogy:
A. A watch is complex.
B. A watch does not come into existence by itself because it is so complex.
C. Man made the watch.
Likewise:
A. Man is even more complex.
B. A man cannot come into existence by itself because he is so complex.
C. God made man.
The reason this is such a poor argument for God is that it builds a pyramid, in which the more complex the entity, the more impossible it is for it to be self-created. And yet what does this analogy do but ratchet up the complexity one more notch to God? God is most complex of all. If God the Most Complex can be self-created, why can’t the universe, which is infinitely less complex, also be self-created? It has to be easier for one atom to come into being than for God to.
The truth, of course, is that it is not easier. Complexity is beside the point. Believers cite the intricacy of the human brain and the beauties of the natural world, but if nothing existed in the universe except for one single atom, we would still be faced with the same problem: where did it come from? Invoking the term “God” solves nothing. But dismissing the term “God” solves nothing as well. Leibniz famously asked “Why is there not nothing?” Even to think of nothing is impossible, as we inevitably imagine some sort of universe-box that is empty. But here we are, here are the atoms, there is the Grand Canyon, and they're both impossible and undeniably true. That’s mystery.
The English language has many glories, dished from the stone soup created by Danes, Angles, Saxons, Africans, and Romans. I’m partial to the Danish -gg- legacy: eggs, foggy, Wigglesworth. But my favorite word is Latinate: mystery.
A melange of vowels, liquids, and sibilants—not a plosive in sight—“mystery” is a beautiful word just in its sound and orthography, and its meanings even more so. From the time I was a little girl, I loved the mystery genre of books: Nancy Drew, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Even now I’m drawn to paperbacks with illustrations of cobble streets, fog, and English lamplights.
This is just aesthetics, an inborn proclivity such as liking the color red more than green. But there’s more to mystery than atmosphere and book genre. I first thought deeply about it when I was a college student studying poetry. When I was a teenager I tended toward a kind of ecstatic oblivion, getting high, putting on huge headphones, and listening for hours to Nights in White Satin and other head music. When I became a Christian at age 16, I put that away, gratefully, and came to appreciate the beauty of clarity. I saw how sinking oneself in that kind of vague but powerful emotion could drain you of energy, truthfulness, and virtue. And I lost patience with those who preferred to hold vague unsubstantiated notions about life, actually preferring not to examine their beliefs, maybe because nailing them down might require commitment and narrow their ability to pick at the buffet of life.
When I became an agnostic at age 19, one of the first things I did was to abandon my practical, help-the-world major of economics and become the English major I was at heart. Still critical of the world and a devotee of clarity, I loved Jane Eyre and hated Madame Bovary. But the first crack in my armor came while studying poetry with a textbook called Western Wind. This text/anthology became my bedside companion for years to come; I’ve probably spent more time reading it than any other book I’ve owned. In one section, the author, John Frederick Nims, discusses two lines of poetry by William Blake. The two lines are:
The Son of Morn in weary Night’s decline,
The lost traveller’s dream under the hill.
About these two lines Nims says something quite profound. Without the rest of the poem, we can’t really know what these lines mean. And yet despite the complete lack of context and, in effect, meaning, we are deeply moved by these lines. They are beautiful, and heavy with meaning that we feel even if we can’t think it.
How does that happen? The individual words are somewhat archetypal—son, night, dream—but not extremely so. “The lost traveller’s dream under the hill” is fairly nonsensical and yet doesn’t feel so. It feels evocative, sad, nostalgic. There’s word choice and there’s rhythm, but in the end these dark shapes on paper translate to sounds in our minds, then images in our heads, concepts and feelings, that somehow, you feel, they shouldn’t be able to. It’s a mystery.
I started thinking more about this in the year or so after Jay and I got married. I had read about the role that some artists thought dreams and the subconscious played in their artwork, but tended to pooh-pooh it. (As a lifelong non-artist, I was uniquely unqualified to do so, but when did that ever stop me?) Then shortly after getting married, something new started to happen. At night when I would start to fall asleep, in that woozy half-conscious state, full-blown works of art would appear in my mind’s eye. This happened time and again for a good year or so, and each time I was amazed. These weren’t images of famous works that I had seen somewhere else; they were coming from my own mind. It kind of opened me up in a way, made me see that there’s so much more there than we experience most of the time.
I thought of mystery again while reading the novel Atonement a few years ago. There’s a scene in which the young Briony sits in her room and again and again moves her finger or arm. She can’t understand how she can make that happen. She thinks about moving her finger, thinks, thinks, thinks, doesn’t do it, considers it, thinks, considers, but then does—and the finger moves. I used to do this very same thing as a child. I freaked myself out! Just as I’d stare at a mirror and almost faint thinking about the relationship between that image and the mind that was staring at it. Craziness.
This mystery of consciousness and will is just a part of the greater mystery of our entire existence. And the question of God trumps all. Believers often use the famous watch analogy to try to prove the necessity of God’s existence, but this has always seemed like the absolutely worst argument to me. You may know the analogy:
A. A watch is complex.
B. A watch does not come into existence by itself because it is so complex.
C. Man made the watch.
Likewise:
A. Man is even more complex.
B. A man cannot come into existence by itself because he is so complex.
C. God made man.
The reason this is such a poor argument for God is that it builds a pyramid, in which the more complex the entity, the more impossible it is for it to be self-created. And yet what does this analogy do but ratchet up the complexity one more notch to God? God is most complex of all. If God the Most Complex can be self-created, why can’t the universe, which is infinitely less complex, also be self-created? It has to be easier for one atom to come into being than for God to.
The truth, of course, is that it is not easier. Complexity is beside the point. Believers cite the intricacy of the human brain and the beauties of the natural world, but if nothing existed in the universe except for one single atom, we would still be faced with the same problem: where did it come from? Invoking the term “God” solves nothing. But dismissing the term “God” solves nothing as well. Leibniz famously asked “Why is there not nothing?” Even to think of nothing is impossible, as we inevitably imagine some sort of universe-box that is empty. But here we are, here are the atoms, there is the Grand Canyon, and they're both impossible and undeniably true. That’s mystery.
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