“My heart grew dark with grief, and where I looked, I saw only death. My own town became a torment to me and my own home a grotesque abode of misery. All we had done together was now a grim ordeal without him. My eyes searched everywhere for him, but he was not be seen. I hated all the places we had been together, because he was not in them, and they could no longer whisper to me “Here he comes!”

(Confessions,IV, iv, 9).