but something had changed, or was changing. everything always did, no matter how much he loved what he had. the only redemption would be if all the tumbling and rearrangement were to mean something. but he was aware of no pattern. if there were one great equality, one fine universal balance that he could understand, then he would know that there were others, and that someday the curtain of the world would lift onto a sunny springlike stillness and reveal that nothing - nothing - had been for naught, neither the suffering of all the children that he had seen suffering, nor love that ends in death: nothing.