Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

by Brian Greene

The appeal of a law of nature might be its timeless quality. But what drives us to seek the timeless, to search for qualities that may last forever? Perhaps it all comes from our singular awareness that we are anything but timeless, that our lives are anything but forever. Resonating with my newfound thinking on math, physics, and the allure of eternity, this felt on target. It was an approach to human motivation grounded in a plausible reaction to a pervasive recognition. It was an approach that didn’t make it up on the fly. As I continued to think about this conclusion, it seemed to promise something grander still. Science, as Spengler noted, is one response to the knowledge of our inescapable end. And so is religion. And so is philosophy. But, really, why stop there? According to Otto Rank, an early disciple of Freud who was fascinated by the human creative process, we surely shouldn’t. The artist, in Rank’s assessment, is someone whose “creative impulse…attempts to turn ephemeral life into personal immortality.”4 Jean-Paul Sartre went farther, noting that life itself is drained of meaning “when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.”5 The suggestion, then, threading its way through these and other thinkers who followed, is that much of human culture—from artistic exploration to scientific discovery—is driven by life reflecting on the finite nature of life.