THE INNER LIFE

Thoughts of mine, so wildly pressing
Through the mystery of my soul,
While my calm face, unconfessing,
Keeps the solemn secret whole.
          Oft I ponder,
          With vague wonder,
Whence ye come—and what ye mean;
Visions of my world unseen!

(London Society, Jan. 1864)

"Here is My Secret.  It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart.  Anything essential is invisible to the eyes." —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings." —Charlotte Brontë, Villette

Both the origin of the world and its inner truth are unknowable.
—Damascius' treatise on the beginning of things

Here's the secret meaning of the Queen of Diamonds*: "Don't desire to be high-prized."  From The Idler, 1895.

*Note the diamond motif at the queen's feet.

From Samuel Orchart Beeton's Book of Jokes and Jests:

Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, was tormented by the conspiracies incessantly formed against his throne and person. One day a man presented himself at a public levee, and told the monarch that he knew of a means by which the monarch might discover any conspiracy against him, and that for a certain sum of money he would reveal it to him. Dionysius promised to give him what he asked, upon which the man, taking him aside, said to him, "I possess no such secret, but if you tell your subjects that I have revealed to you one that is infallible, no one will henceforth dare to conspire against you." Dionysius thought the advice excellent, adopted it, paid the money, and lived tranquilly thereafter.

"The secret of life included within its immeasurable orbit the secret of death."
—John Cowper Powys, Porius

Intriguingly, freshly fallen snow can actually store sounds as well as project them with clarity.  A carefully gathered snowball is like a library of sounds stored on crystalline shelves.  When held to the ear like a seashell, it may whisper the secrets it has absorbed.  Ergo, composer and music theorist John Rahn describes "a little snowball of sounds” (Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics, 1995).  Snow expert Nancy Armstrong explains that "When snow is newly fallen, sound waves are absorbed into its soft surface.  Later, when the surface has hardened, sounds may travel further and sound clearer, because the snow reflects sound waves, sending them more quickly through the air” (Snowman in a Box, 2002).  Barbara Blair concurs: "snow is a wonderful substance to enhance awareness” (Communing with the Infinite, 2006).  [The preceding is an excerpt from our Field Guide to Identifying Unicorns by Sound.]

We stumbled upon this bookplate in an old* magazine volume from the Harvard College Library.  Any writer who has been under a deadline might relate to the symbolism.
*1855

"It was as if the grey earth had become the mystery of Time, and the grey sky had become the mystery of Space, and as if all that the inhabitants of the earth had to do now was to drink of the sky and eat of the earth and conduct their affairs in peace and quietness and common sense between the one and the other." —John Cowper Powys, Porius

(The illustration is from a 1918 issue of Scribner's magazine.)

"His discovery was that everything in the world is a fluctuating and wavering image in wind-stirred water; and that what is called truth is simply the particular aspect of this image as it strikes a man, or a woman, or a dog, or a horse, or a fish, or a snake, or a worm, or a bird, or an insect, or even a plant or reed."  —John Cowper Powys, Porius

An illustration from an 1897 issue of Century Illustrated magazine.  The caption reads: "The spirit of eternal, changeless silence reigns supreme."

"The Questioner of the Sphinx":  an illustration from an 1880 issue of Scribner's magazine.

"The future?  There's no such thing as the future!"
—Gustav Meyrink, Walpurgisnacht

"You know, the terrible thing is that ... that you never grow old."
—Gustav Meyrink, Walpurgisnacht

"Everything visible is made of gold."
—Robert Desnos, Liberty or Love!