Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went.

The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are.

'A rolling stone gathers no moss.' Try as I might I could not remember the meaning. At last I hazarded, 'Well, it means a person who's always active and never …

'Everything is true', he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought'.

One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And t…