This is it, I think: the greatest tragedy at the centre of everything is not that the world is empty or evil or ugly, but that it's full of immeasurably beautiful things that tend toward decay. I'm still unsure if I can accept the idea of grief as a final form of love, but I understand intimately, now, its fundamental truth: horror and pain and loss do not exist in opposition to love, but as affirmation of it. All this terror because of all of this beauty. All of this just to have something worthwhile to ruin.