My head ached. Vague pains beset my body--squirting about mysteriously from neck to gut to ankle and back again by way of knee and pelvis and teeth. My tongue burned--dry and yet sticky--inflamed and evil-tasting to itself--the tongue of us millions who sedulously obey the cigarette advertising. (And just possibly the throat of some of us, too, I thought wincingly.) Idiot infantilism, scalding oral eros, obsession, compulsion, tobacco! I smoked on defiantly, wretchedly. The jiffy coffee lay in my stomach like a solid and the heat of it ran from my pores. I stared at my body--the wens and scars and indurations and red blots--the warts and excrescences and moles--the minor tumors that are our common response to age and attrition--the crinkling paper of my skin--the sun-tan that reflected from a mirror like youth itself but that, at chin-length, lost its satin and was seen to be marched and counter-marched with freckles and a rash of prickly heat. I surveyed the expanded, slack viscera beneath an irreducible fat that slid when I turned, like a hot-water bottle under my flabby epidermis. I noticed the cord inside my bent elbow, standing out like an old man's now, and poorly covered with a crêpy mantle that lacked elasticity--the time-shrunk backs of my hands--my toes, warped out of alignment, marked and marred with the miles and with the leather boxes we wear--their nails, turned in, split, chitinous--small, magenta lace of erupted capillaries--shine and scale on my shins--myself: waxwork--worn battlefield--warrant of decay, incipient cadaver. I did not need to see my face. Fatigue dwelt in me always, now. Oh--(barring such incidents in a single one of these tired cells as neoplasm, of course)--I would have exhibited my inordinate energy, my vitality, my apparent arrestation of age for another ten years or twenty or thirty--I might have been an agile old man, supple and good at games (with suitable allowance for the years) whose eyes never clouded, whose hair never fell, diving off tall dolphins to amuse my grandchildren and dancing gracefully with Ricky to the applause of other septagenarians and the infinite boredom of teen-agers. But I was old already--scribbled with the nasty information of years, apprised of slinking hurts, debilities, transient toxicities and nauseas that would increase and increase and increase--or would have done so except for that one, rambunctious cell. Who wants to be old? What man, in his so-called prime, fails to note his coming scenery--the bandaged varicosities, the braces, the cut bunions, the scarification and bloodless horn, the smells and tastes of himself, the thickening spectacles, the hearing aids, the pills and petit prostheses, the gouty overpall, the migraine and vertigo, rheum, sour burp, dyspnoeia, heart-kick, cracking, and the myriad painful impediments of urination, defecation, respiration, transpiration, the organic wheeze, the gradual invasion of death? He wants to be old who accepts it.