Thus, too, they came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in the company of a memory that serves no purpose. Even the past, of which they thought incessantly, had a savor only of regret. For they would have wished to add to it all that they regretted having left undone…. And thus there was always something missing in their lives. Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whose men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars. —ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague
