"intractable mystery" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to describe a mystery that is difficult or seemingly impossible to solve, such as a crime that has gone unsolved for many years. For example: "The disappearance of the Mona Lisa remains an intractable mystery that has baffled investigators for centuries."
These are two of my questions for William T. Vollmann, the prolific, award-winning novelist and journalist whose new book, "Poor People," centers on just such a Pyrrhic, postmodern project: asking the unfathomable of the unfortunate and using their numbed, predictable responses as proof of their plight's intractable mystery.
There is much misery in Terence Davies's new movie, and much of the fear that CS Lewis said was like grief, and also a kind of vertigo and euphoria at looking directly, as if for the first time, at the mystery of existence: the painful, intractable mystery romantic love will never quite be able to solve or explain away.
As I spoke to them, I found the perspectives from the laboratory and the tech startup diverged on many of these points, raising another, more disquieting question: As human memory changes from an intractable mystery to something that can be engineered, who will get to decide how it works?
The origin of Homo is one of the most intriguing and intractable mysteries in human evolution.
But the evidence the authors present is compelling and does a great deal to address many otherwise intractable mysteries of human behaviour.
Gamma ray bursts, first detected serendipitously in 1967 by an American space satellite that was monitoring compliance with the 1963 atmospheric nuclear test-ban treaty, were long one of the most intractable mysteries in astronomy.
García appears to view that putt's failure to track into the hole as one of the universe's intractable mysteries, so it was forgivable that he should follow the bitterest moment of his career with perhaps the sourest press conference appearance in Open history.
On "House" Dr. Gregory House fired one of his long-suffering assistants, leading the other two to resign and leaving him without a team to help him explore the hospital's intractable medical mysteries.
He watched how I reacted to a particularly intractable blob of mystery shit -- a frozen pond of hamburger grease, a frieze of gristle -- and screamed, "ATTACK, ATTACK".
Wilbur and Orville were able to unlock the mystery of these heretofore intractable problems along with the seemingly impossible task of controlling a heavier than air machine.
DNA sequencing will provide the key to many medical mysteries, and also targeted treatments for currently intractable disorders.
