At this moment when John Grady reflects back on his life and sees all the love and death and violence he’s experienced, he realizes that not only is the world full of pain and death, but it is also full of life and beauty. He sees the truth in the world around him that suffering and cruelty do not make the world barren and devoid of passion, but make the precious beauty that does exist that much more powerful. He does not become a cold cynic like Dona Alfonsa because he sees the crucial connection between pain and beauty. He does not remain paralyzed and soulless by this great sorrow, but turns it around into something rare and costly: beauty.
He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
Instead of focusing on the pain, he sees the product of that pain: beauty of a single flower. Beauty would be meaningless and ordinary if it were not for pain just as happiness would not be so sweet if one had never felt sadness.