...of exile

Thus they endured that profound misery of all prisoners and all exiles, which is to live with a memory that is of no use to them. Even the past, which they thought of endlessly, had only the taste of remorse and longing. They would have liked to be able to add to it everything that they regretted not having done when they could do it, with the person for whom the were waiting - just as they brought the absent one into every situation of their life as prisoners, even the relatively happy ones, making them inevitably dissatisfied with what they now were. Impatient with the present, hostile to the past and deprived of a future, we really did then resemble those whom justice or human hatred has forced to live behind bars. In the last resort, the only way to escape this unbearable holiday was to make the trains run again in our imagination and to fill the hours with the repeated ringing of the doorbell, however silent it obstinately remained.

[The Plague, Camut, A.]