DE Weekly: Creativity, Greene, & Until the End of Time
Below is an archived email originally sent on May 11, 2026.
Creativity, Greene, & Until the End of Time
A little over a year ago, I read a great book by American physicist Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, called Until the End of Time. The book explores the history of the universe from its beginnings to its eventual heat death, with a special focus on life and consciousness in the in between.
For someone who has little to no knowledge of universe-level physics (but who still has a wild fascination with such topics), I really enjoyed this book; Greene does a fantastic job explaining complex scientific processes with the reader and making sense of the material.
While explaining the physics of matter in the universe, Greene also manages to focus on philosophical concepts such as consciousness, meaning, and the impermanence of our existence. Specifically, he shares his scientific opinion on why we humans might feel the instinctual urge to create art while we are here.
“We are thrust into the world without consultation,” writes Greene. “Once here, we are granted leave to embrace life for merely a moment.”
What do we do with that moment, that fleeting instant in time in the universe in which we exist?
For Greene, a scientist, science is but one response to the knowledge of our inescapable end. So is religion, he argues, and so is philosophy, for that matter.
But why stop there?
As Greene so aptly suggests, “The artist moves toward psychic health by accepting mortality––we’re going to die, that’s that, get over it . . . [and so we shift] the urge for eternity onto a symbolic form carried by creative works.”
Surely, one can understand what he means by exploring such works as Haydn’s The Creation, the works of Shakespeare, and so on.
Forgive me for the following long quote, but I find that Greene explains the human desire (and sometimes utter need) to create art to be a perfect encapsulation of his setup:
“Most of us deal quietly with the need to lift ourselves beyond the everyday. Most of us allow civilization to shield us from the realization that we are part of a world that, when we're gone, will hum along, barely missing a beat: We focus our energy on what we can control. We build community, We participate. We care. We laugh. We cherish. We comfort. We grieve. We love. We celebrate. We consecrate. We regret. We thrill to achievement, sometimes our own, sometimes of those we respect or idolize.”
And that’s exactly why many of us feel the need to create something, anything, during our brief existence in this universe.
The yearning to hold on to life for as long as we can, Greene explains, has not been requited by the universe––at least not yet, and perhaps it never will be. But, nevertheless, we still feel the need to create and to show something that captures our unique take and understanding of human existence.
For him, all art owes itself in some regard to this innate desire we have as humans once we realize the finitude of our existence.
Greene is not alone in this notion; artists of all sorts have echoed the same sentiment over the centuries.
It was Jean-Paul Sartre, in fact, who suggested that life is drained of meaning “when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.”
This is carried further by Tennessee Williams, who wrote that “ignorance––of mortality––is a comfort. A man don’t have that comfort, he’s the only living thing that conceives of death.”
Flip that on its head, and you have the sentiment expressed by George Bernard Shaw’s Ecrasia: “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”
“Without music,” as the famous Friedrich Nietzsche quote goes, “life would be unbearable.”
It becomes ultimately clear to us, then, that creation––art, music, stories, philosophy, what have you––is driven by those of us who reflect on the finite nature of life and feel the urge to share that nature with others.
I believe this is why some artists, such as Shakespeare and Mozart, have transcended generation after generation: in some way, they have uniquely illuminated the reality of human life in a way that we can all appreciate, so much so that each generation can understand them despite their differences.
This covers the bases for why humans create art in the first place. But, how would we answer the question of why we create art at all when all of it is eventually going to disappear someday?
This is a point Greene makes when discussing the eventual heat death of the universe; eventually, all physical matter in the universe is going to decay and will eventually cease to exist altogether.
Thinking this far in advance, how do we justify our innate desire to create something that lasts?
At this point, Greene quotes Joseph Wood Krutch, stating that, “Man needs eternity, as the whole history of his aspirations bears witness; but the eternity of art is, in all probability, the only sort he will ever get.”
This is what Greene refers to in a chapter header as the Lure of Eternity.
You see, at some point, we all come to realize that we are mortal, and that we will leave this Earth one day. And, to some degree, we can also comprehend the science that says all physical matter will disappear from the universe one day, too.
But the amazing thing is that this realization doesn’t cause us to flee and run for cover from an eventual end; instead, we learn to accept it, and to make light of it. It does not stop us from wanting to create something that lasts, from leaving a “whisper intended for our distant descendants,” as Greene says.
We cannot all have a legacy that outlives us. But, the fact that we understand legacy at all is amazing. It allows us to examine ourselves and try to create something that lasts.
It’s one of the gifts of our unique human consciousness––something that even Greene says science has not yet fully understood, and which provides us with endless wonder.
“To me, the future that science now envisions highlights how our moment of thought, our instant of light, is at once rare, wondrous, and precious.” –– Brian Greene, Until the End of Time
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
I enjoy all sorts of other genres outside of philosophy, and science-related books are one of those genres. As you see here, sometimes, you’ll even find one loaded with philosophy. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in outer space, physics, and philosophy in general.
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