All I know is the dark, the night underground. And that’s all there really is. That’s all there is to know, in the end. The silence, and the dark. Yo… - Ursula K. Le Guin

So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

And I know that all I understand about living is having your work to do, and being able to do it. That’s the pleasure, and the glory, and all. And if you can’t do the work, or it’s taken from you, then what’s any good? You have to have something....

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.