In the center of our galaxy lurks a black hole with a mass four billion times greater than the sun, a cosmic engine of such power that it will eventually consume everything humanity has ever created: calculus, music, poetry, mathematics, all of it destined for oblivion in that screaming void. Yet on this knowledge, the seventh annual Universe in Verse, a celebration blending science with poetry to explore how we find meaning in an indifferent universe, commissioned poet Maria Popova to write a meditation on living fully despite cosmic mortality. The resulting piece, "But We Had Music," captures a paradox at the heart of human existence: knowing that even the universe itself is dying, how do we choose to live?

Universe in Verse began as a creative collaboration that recognized a hunger in audiences for something beyond dry science facts or abstract poetry alone. The event brings together scientists, poets, musicians, and artists to explore big questions about existence, reality, and our place in the cosmos. In this seventh season, the organizers partnered with Australian musician and writer Nick Cave and Brazilian filmmaker Daniel Bruson to turn Popova's poem into an animated work that captures its emotional weight. The project sits within a larger tradition of asking how art and science intersect: how poetry and animation can communicate truths about physics and philosophy in ways that reach the heart, not just the intellect.

Popova's poem embodies a specific kind of wisdom sometimes called "cosmic pessimism with a human face." She acknowledges the terrifying reality that at our galaxy's center, a supermassive black hole with the mass of 4 billion suns continuously pulls matter into itself, a one-way trip from which not even light escapes. She names what will be lost: Euclid's mathematical postulates, Bach's Goldberg Variations, the entire edifice of human knowledge and art. This is not poetic exaggeration; it is physics. The universe itself is expanding and cooling, entropy increasing, stars eventually burning out. And yet, Popova writes, knowing all this, when she sees a constellation of starlings flicker across an evening sky, the moment is enough. The wonder remains real. The eternity is experienced in that single minute of awe.

This tension, between cosmic insignificance and immediate beauty, has always been central to how humans find meaning. Rather than despair, Popova argues that connection is the answer: friendship, collaboration, the act of creating together for "the brief time we have together on this lonely, perfect planet." She notes that "right this minute across time zones and opinions people are making plans making meals making promises and poems," emphasizing that human meaning-making happens in the small, intimate acts of daily life. The poem's title itself, "But We Had Music," suggests defiance in the gentlest way: yes, the universe will end, but we had this, beauty, art, togetherness, and that matters.

The Universe in Verse itself embodies this philosophy in its structure. It is not a lecture series teaching facts about cosmology; it is a "many-hearted labor of love" that invites collaboration, animation, music, and poetry into the conversation about reality. By pairing scientific truth with artistic response, the project argues that facing the universe's grandeur and indifference requires more than intellect alone, it requires imagination, emotion, and community. In an era when existential anxiety about climate change, mortality, and cosmic insignificance weighs on many people, especially young people, Universe in Verse offers a model: acknowledge the reality, feel the weight of it, and then turn toward beauty, art, and human connection as forms of meaning-making that are no less real for being temporary.