sphinxity

plural sphinxities

1. A profound riddle or conundrum.

   At first we stand agedly solemn before the sphinxity of life, and "on ne devient pas jeune qu'avec le temps."

   1909, Sir James Henry Yoxall, The Wander Years, page 233

   3 more examples

   Like the poem of Epysychidion, by Shelley, the entrails of our epilogomena, will be caviare to the many-headed but to the select few will be as water to the parched earth, as manna to the hungry Israelite; they will unravel our sphinxities, and untwist our enigmatics, so that our dictum shall be as the opening of the seventh seal, or the finality of cherubian metastasis.

   1841 December 30, “Musical Intelligence”, in The Musical World, volume 16, number 301, page 424

   […] the "sphinxity" of humans themselves, the riddle that we carry within us and that we have assigned ourselves to solve.

   1989, Dietmar Kamper, Jean Baudrillard, Christoph Wulf, Looking Back on the End of the World, page 90

   We always end up understanding it and the intimate satisfaction we gain from guessing at its sphinxities amply repays the laboriousness of our efforts.

   2015, Patrick McGuinness, Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siècle France, page 36