DE Weekly: Art, Death, & Impermanence
Below is an archived email originally sent on March 17, 2025.
Art, Death, & Impermanence
“We are thrust into the world without consultation”, writes Brian Greene, and “Once here, we are granted leave to embrace life for merely a moment.”
Why do we feel the need to create? Art, music, literature, something, anything at all?
Greene attests our intrinsic desire to create is due to our desire to hang on to the brief moment in time that is our lives.
We feel the need to create because we are aware that, one day, we are not going to be here anymore. Maybe if we create something worth handing down, future generations may know a small piece of us.
We cannot all have a legacy that outlives us, but we can try. And the fact that we have the clarity to understand this is worth celebrating in itself.
We are born into this world, and we can examine ourselves and our own existence and try to share that with other people––something that captures our unique perspective on human existence.
Tennessee Williams wrote through one of his characters that “ignorance––of mortality––is a comfort. A man don’t have that comfort, he’s the only living thing that conceives of death.”
Herein lies why we feel the need to create something, to do something with our time here. Unlike a cat or a dog or a bird or a squirrel or a plant or any other being, we––human beings––are the only ones viscerally self-aware of our own mortality.
This doesn’t have to be bleak, and this doesn’t have to be a negative influence on our day-to-day lives.
There are some who ruminate on the reality of their own eventual death and think it renders life meaningless. I would argue exactly the opposite; it is precisely because life ends that it is meaningful.
We are not here forever. So we must cherish the life we are living now. It was Franz Kafka who said this a century before I did: “The meaning of life is that it stops.”
On this same fact, Greene wrote that this acceptance “allows us to make life’s impermanence and the scarcity of self-reflective awareness the basis for value and a foundation for gratitude.”
We don’t have to live in fear of our own death. Instead, we can be grateful that we are here in the first place. And once we are, maybe we can create something which future generations see as worth passing down.
I’m sure everyone who has ever lived has, at some point, yearned to hold on to life for as long as they could. As we all know, though, this isn’t possible forever.
One way we can get over this, Greene writes, is to “[shift] the urge for eternity onto a symbolic form carried by creative works.” In other words, we can create.
Even if what we create isn’t read, listened to, watched, or seen by people 2000 years in the future, at least we had the courage to try. There is nobility in this. There is nobility in a life lived. There is nobility in being.
“Nothing is permanent. Nothing is absolute. And so, in the search for value and purpose, the only insights of relevance, the only answers of significance, are those of our own making. In the end, during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning. Let us embark.” –– Brian Greene
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
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