inapprehensible

Their stillness is the reason why these memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow—a vast, inapprehensible melancholy.

And then she started smiling again, not a mocking smile, not as if she were enjoying herself, but a terminal smile, a knotted smile somewhere between a sensation of beauty and misery, though not beauty and misery per se, but Little Beauty and Little Misery, paradoxical dwarves, travelling and inapprehensible dwarves.

Unapprehen′sible, inapprehensible; Unapprehen′sive, not apprehensive or fearful: not intelligent.—n.

Inapprehensible, in-ap-pre-hen′si-bl, adj. not apprehensible or intelligible.—n.

They shape different parts of the world inside our heads, and they shape them not as pleasures, but as encounters with the inapprehensible – the numinous, to use a word that was very fashionable when I was a student.