Wisdom is not for knowing but for understanding.
It had no end and therefore no beginning, yet it progressed. Thus it was timeless, infinitely present and so could be taken to be a representation of time, which cannot be pictured by those who imagine themselves linear subjects to it.
Jen represented hope; and hope, she instinctively knew, would always be shadowed with pain, just as her despair, now, in the niche behind the tapestry, was shadowed with something like opposite of pain--a numbed uncaring, an acceptance of the thrall of death, almost a fervent wish for it.
