![]() But the war went on, and in the protracted post-traumatic reckoning with its aftermath - this gasping ellipsis in the narrative of humanity - Auden revised his understanding of the world, of life, of our human imperative, and so he revised his poem. “September 1, 1939” became a generation’s life-raft for “the waves of anger and fear” subsuming the unexamined certainties of yore, splashing awake the “euphoric dream” of a final and permanent triumph over evil. He looked at the stars and saw “ironic points of light” above a world “defenseless under the night” he looked at himself and saw a creature “composed like them of Eros and of dust, beleaguered by the same negation and despair.” It may be that art is simply what we call our most constructive coping mechanism for the incomprehension of life and mortality, and so Auden coped through his art. ![]() Just as Auden was reaching the peak of his poetic powers, the world’s deadliest war broke out, brutal and incomprehensible. The child of two world wars, he had no illusion about how our humanity comes unwoven by its own pull but is also the enchanted loom that makes life worth living. Auden (February 21, 1907–September 29, 1973) had no illusion about the entropic nature of reality - a science-lensed lucidity he wove into his poetic search for truth, for meaning, for a way to live with our human fragility, with our twin capacities for terror and tenderness inside an impartial universe he knew to be impervious to our plans and pleas. We are only alive because our Sun is burning out. The extinguisher of every star that unlooses its thermal energy into the cold sublime of spacetime as it runs out of fuel, warming up the orbiting planets with its dying breath. The frayer of every cell that animates our bodies with being. It pleased him, too, that entropy looked like energy - its twin in the making and unmaking of the universe. Without entropy, there would be no time - at least not for us, creatures of time.Ĭlausius built on the Greek word for transformation, tropē, because he believed that leaning on ancient languages to name new scientific concepts made them available to all living tongues, belonging to all people for all time. Without entropy, the universe would be a vast eternal stillness - a frozen fixity in which never and forever are one. This transformation of order into disorder, of constancy into discontinuity, is how we register change and tell one moment from the next. Vincent Millay’s perfect phrase, that “lovers and thinkers” become “one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.” ![]() Perpetually inclining us toward, in poet Mary Ruefle’s perfect phrase, “the end of time, which is also the end of poetry (and wheat and evil and insects and love).” Perpetually ensuring, in poet Edna St. The dissolution of cohesion along the arrow of time. ![]() ![]() The thermodynamic collapse of physical systems into increasing levels of disorder and uncertainty. In 1865 - a year before the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology, the year Emily Dickinson composed her stunning pre-ecological poem about how life-forms come into being - the German physicist Rudolf Clausius coined the word entropy to describe the undoing of being. THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER SEVEN This is the seventh of nine installments in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. ![]()
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