Mystery.

Hutty, The Garden Gate, undated

"Grownups," writes Claude Debussy in 1901, "tend to forget that as children they were forbidden to open the insides of their dolls." This, he claims, is why they end up "poking their aesthetic noses into things that don't concern them." Marco Polo and Neil Armstrong are only looking for a new clock whose gears they can inspect. We go out of our way to hear the ticking of a bad heart or the ticking of the stars. Our towns are built on piles of broken dolls. There are cracked porcelain cheeks at the bottom of the sea, torn stuffed limbs in deep space. We're all guilty of what Debussy calls "a crime of high treason against the cause of mystery." 

- Francois Lesure, from Debussy on Music