In 1819, a 24-year-old guy thought he was going to die. Soon. His brother had just died of tuberculosis and he told his friends that he felt like a living ghost. Like Han Solo, he had a bad feeling about this. So what did he do about it? As any young person madly in love with both life and a would-be spouse, who realized that none of his cherished hopes and dreams would come to pass, he wrote a staggering amount of poetry. (Hang on…I’m getting a note that most people don’t write poetry? Weird.) Well John Keats did. Among his many poems and letters, he attended to the mysteries of life, death, and the afterlife. And unfortunately, it turns out that Keats was right: he died two years later. But he left a remarkable legacy that people are still thinking about today.

His 1819 poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is one of his most famous. In it, a person observes the art depicted on the outside of some pottery and thinks about the moment in time frozen in the scenes. The scenes depict perfectly-crafted happiness: the moment before a kiss happens in which desire will never abate. A song that will never become tiresome nor cease because it’s both never actually played nor will it ever stop playing. The anticipation of a festival just before a sacrifice is made. All these ostensibly perfect moments are untarnished by the reality of actual humanness. The scenes are kind of like our social media posts today: perfection unmarred by the imperfection of each passing moment. The poem ends with the observation that when the current observer gets old and dies, the scenes on this urn will still be frozen in this exact moment of perfection, speaking to new generations. The final lines are among Keats’s most famous:

“‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all
                                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”1

There’s still all sorts of debate raging about what those lines mean exactly and whether they’re spoken from the observer’s perspective or the urn’s. Those lines themselves and the sentiment they articulate are unknowable mysteries. All ye know on earth, and all ye need to know? Okay, that may be accurate, but there’s still satisfaction in thinking about what we don’t know. And every once in a while, humans are actually clever enough to figure something out that was once deemed unknowable, like that time we landed on the moon or eradicated polio. Bless the brilliant John Keats, who faced his own untimely death, firmly standing on the precipice of the greatest mystery. Knowing that there was nothing he could really know about death or what comes after, he chose to wrestle the mystery anyway. And he also left us the gift of ending this ponderance of mystery with a mystery. Clever fellow. Add to that: the urn he writes about never even really existed; Keats imagined the whole thing. Swoon.

I’ll be exploring mystery in a short series of essays. I’ll clarify that I don’t necessarily mean mystery as in the genre of literature. I mean the broader scope of Big Questions. I mean:

Mys·ter·y [mis-tuh-ree, -tree]2
Noun
1) Anything that is kept secret or remains unexplained or unknown.
2) Any truth that is unknowable except by divine revelation.
Synonyms: puzzle, enigma, conundrum, riddle, secret, problem, unsolved problem

Let’s dive into some of the mysteries that have stood the test of time and remain unsolved or unsolvable. If it’s labelled ineffable, let’s go eff it up. I want to hear about the mysteries you’re preoccupied with. Share in the comments or find me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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Notes:

Artwork: Sky by grafixart_photo is licensed under CC0 Creative Commons.

1)      Lipking, Lawrence, et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Seventh ed., vol. 2, Norton, 2000. 851-853
2)      “Mystery.” Dictionary.com, www.dictionary.com/browse/mystery.