themarginalian.org · 9 hours ago

The More Loving One: the Science of Entropy and the Art of Alternative Endings – the Marginalian

Maria Popova traces the life of W.H. Auden through the twin lenses of thermodynamics and heartbreak, showing how his understanding of entropy - the universe's irreversible drift toward disorder - shaped both his poetry and his capacity to love. When the man he loved deeply could not love him back in kind, Auden did not withdraw; he held on through the fraying, until what remained was something steadier than passion: a lifelong friendship, a mutual cherishment that outlasted the tumult. That stubborn persistence found its most distilled expression in his poem "The More Loving One," with its quiet, defiant premise - "If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me" - a line that reads less like resignation than like a kind of moral courage. Popova also illuminates the single most poignant revision in Auden's body of work: his wartime change of "We must love one another or die" to "We must love one another and die," a one-word shift that absorbed the full weight of eighty million lost lives without surrendering the imperative to love anyway. Together, the science and the story suggest that loving generously, in the face of both cosmic indifference and personal loss, may be the most distinctly human act there is.