Growing Older And Lonelier

Friedrich Nietzsche, a Letter to Herr Ob. Reg. R. Krug, November 16, 1880 (tr. A. Ludovici): 

With what wistful eyes you will look back upon your life to-day. We grow older and therefore lonelier; the love that leaves us is precisely that love which was lavished upon us like an unconscious necessity not owing to our particular qualities, but often in spite of them. The curtain falls on our past when our mother dies; it is then for the first time that our childhood and youth become nothing more than a memory. And then the same process extends; the friends of our youth, our teachers, our ideals of those days, all die, and every day we grow more lonely, and ever colder breezes blow about us. . . .