“ ‘Purgatory is not a place, sweetheart. Purgatory is that spiritual condition of restless yearning in which the dead, having in the moment of death caught as it were a first-last instantaneous glimpse of the face of God, are denied a second look – which will distinguish them – so long as a single living soul remembers them – as they actually were, that is to say, not as represented in—”

(James McCourt, Now Voyagers: The Night Sea Journey, p. 512.)