Sand falls through glass at the same rate a star burns through its fuel — slower in one case, unimaginably slower in the other, but running toward the identical zero. He holds the galaxy the way he'd hold the hourglass: loosely, without urgency, because urgency assumes an outcome still in question. Around him the desert has already finished becoming what the stars are still becoming — grain by grain, light-year by light-year, the same process at two different speeds.