Synthesized answer
The author calls life's aimlessness a mystery that eludes us because, despite our searchings, we cannot grasp why people marked by fate come close to us and then depart. The passage describes how we sense the destiny of those who will not live long, yet we are unable to speak the deeper truths we feel, and time rushes on until it is too late [2]. This pattern leads to the question: "Why have they come to us—why do they go so soon? Is it only that we may be convinced of the utter aimlessness of life? It is a mystery that ever eludes us, and all our searchings are vain" [2].
The mystery is further deepened by the hidden forces that govern our lives, such as heredity and unconscious influences, which make our actions seem determined by the dead and the unborn [3]. The author suggests that our senses are too gross to perceive the intimate concordance between the invisible world and our own, so we grope among shadows toward the unknown [4]. Thus, the aimlessness of life remains a mystery because we cannot fully understand the forces that shape our existence or why certain events and people appear and vanish without clear purpose.
Synthesized from the book passages below. Chat with the book on Feynman for follow-up.
From the book
ay be convinced of the utter aimlessness of life? It is a mystery that ever eludes us, and all our searchings are vain. I have often seen these things happen; one day they were so near to me that I scarcely knew was it myself or another whom they concerned.... For it was thus that my brother died. And though he alone had heard the warning whisper, be it ever so unconsciously—for from his earliest days he had concealed the message of disease within him—yet surely had the knowledge of what was to come been borne in upon us also. What are the signs that set apart the creatures for whom…
oud that falls around them at the moment when men seem on the point of touching them, or when hurt has been done them. Some days there are when they seem to be of us, and among us, but a sudden evening comes and they are so far away that we dare not look at them, or ask a question. It is as though they were on life’s further shore, and the feeling rushes in upon us that now, at last, the hour has come for affirming that which is graver, deeper, more human, more real than friendship, pity or love; for saying the thing that is piteously flapping its wings at the back of our throat, and…
pose to be ‘exact’ thought only deepen the mystery of life. There is, for example, the Schopenhauerian theory of love. We had fancied we could at least choose our loves in freedom: but ‘we are told that a thousand centuries divide us from ourselves when we choose the woman we love, and that the first kiss of the betrothed is but the seal which thousands of hands, craving for birth, have impressed upon the lips of the mother they desire.’ And so with the ‘heredity’ of the men of science. ‘We know that the dead do not die. We know that it is not in our churches they are to be found,…
zone’ between the frontiers of consciousness and unconsciousness. The mystery of life is what makes life worth living. ‘’Twas a little being of mystery, like every one else,’ says the old King Arkel of the dead Mélisande. We are such stuff as dreams are made of, might be the ‘refrain’ of all M. Maeterlinck’s plays, and of most of these essays. He is penetrated by the feeling of the mystery in all human creatures, whose every act is regulated by far-off influences and obscurely rooted in things unexplained. Mystery is within us and around us. Of reality we can only get now and then the…
meet those who are not to live long, we are only conscious of the fate that is hanging over them; we see nothing else. If they could they would deceive us, so that they might the more readily deceive themselves. They do all in their power to mislead us; they imagine that their eager smile, their burning interest in life, will conceal the truth; but none the less does the event already loom large before us, and seem indeed to be the mainstay, nay, the very reason of their existence. Death has again betrayed them, and they realise, in bitter sadness, that nothing is hidden from us,…