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

According to The Marginalian, the essay “The More Loving One” weaves the 1865 birth of the term entropy, coined by physicist Rudolf Clausius, with W. H. Auden’s wartime poem about love and mortality. Auden, whose father was a physicist, originally ended a stanza with the plea “We must love one another or die,” but after the devastation of World Two, which left roughly eighty million dead, he altered it to “We must love one another and die.” The piece argues that without entropy there would be no time, and that the inevitable drift toward disorder makes love a stubborn act of resistance. Auden’s revised line now appears in his Collected Poems and serves as the epigraph for the new Universe in Verse volume. The essay reminds listeners that even as the universe trends toward disorder, human affection can persist as a quiet defiance.

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