Consider the following comments on mystery.
Some questions are not problems to be solved but mysteries to be lived inside of.
We are uneasy with mystery, so we trade it for explanations that are smaller than the thing they explain.
The mystery of another person is the last thing love should ever want to abolish.
I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than unquestionable answers.
Richard Feynman
What stays mysterious after we understand it is usually the part that mattered.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that mystery is not merely the gap in our knowledge waiting to be filled, but a quality of the deepest things, that they remain inexhaustible even after we understand them. Open with a personal encounter, perhaps a person we knew for years yet never fully grasped, or an experience that explanation made smaller rather than clearer. Then explore the tension between our hunger to solve and name everything, which is how we cope and build, and our sense that some things are diminished the moment they are pinned down. A useful structural move contrasts mysteries that are simply unsolved, and rightly pursued, against mysteries that are constitutive, where the not knowing is part of what the thing is. Caution: resist the lazy mysticism that calls every unanswered question sacred, since some mysteries are just ignorance, and the honest reflection keeps the difference in view rather than hiding behind awe.