"Life's Mystery": an illustration from The Works of Henry Rose (1890).

An illustration from A Thousand Miles Up the Nile by Amelia Blandford Edwards (1889).  The caption reads: "Each must interpret for himself."

"The Heart of the Mystery": an illustration from a 1902 issue of The Reader magazine.

An illustration from A Bid for Fortune by Guy Newell Boothby (1895). The caption reads: "Could this be the solution of the whole mystery?"

An illustration from The Mahatma and the Hare: A Dream Story by H. Rider Haggard (1911).  The caption reads: "Changed indeed, mysterious, wonderful."

The following chapter plates appear in The Man Trap by Sears Gallagher (1909).  Titles include:

• Chapter Two, in which a Sliding Panel is Mentioned
• Chapter Eight, in which the Plot Thickens
• Chapter Nine, in which the Unexpected Happens
• Chapter Fourteen, in which a Door is Opened
  

From our Magic Words outpost at Blogger:

"'Creation,' like 'creative,' is one of those hypnotic words which are prone to cast a spell upon the understanding and dissolve our thinking into a haze.  And out of this nebulous state of the intellect springs a strange but widely prevalent idea.  The shaping spirit of imagination sits aloof, like God as he is commonly conceived, creating in some thaumaturgic fashion out of nothing its visionary world.  That and that only is deemed to be 'originality'—that, and not the imperial moulding of old matter into imperishably new forms.  The ways of creation are wrapt in mystery; we may only marvel, and bow the head."  —John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu, 1927

Beguiled by a Mystery

(Our guest blog for Gordon Meyer's Rebuilding a Mystery)

The question isn't whether the box is foreground or background; the question is one's own place within in the mystery (in which case, thinking inside the puzzle box may possibly be preferable!)  Optical illusions, phantasmic artwork, and even family snapshots ask us to consider our own beguilement, as it was, as it is, and as it will be.