No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

Bowen’s aphorism shifts “mystery” from the external world to the perceiver. Objects are simply what they are; the sense of enigma arises from the limitations, desires, fears, and interpretive habits of the person looking. The line also implies that perception is creative: the “eye” does not merely register facts but frames, selects, and imbues what it sees with meaning. In that sense, mystery is a psychological and aesthetic effect—produced by attention, distance, and imagination—rather than an inherent property of things. The quote resonates with modernist concerns about subjectivity and with Bowen’s interest in how consciousness and atmosphere can transform ordinary settings into something charged and uncanny.