It worried him, this inability to get the simplest things done in the course of a day. He would wake up in the middle of the night and fret about it. How in the world had he formerly found time to build up a business, raise a family, be on half a dozen boards, work actively on committees and either go out in the evening or plow through the contents of a bulging brief case?

Was it possible that as people grow older the nature of time changed? Could it be that it speeded up for the aged in some mysterious way, as if a bored universe were skipping through the end of the chapter just to get it over with? Or was the answer less metaphysical? Did older people work more slowly? Did it take a man of sixty-five longer to write a letter, shave, clean out a barn, read a newspaper, than a man of thirty? Did men become perfectionists as they grew older, polishing, polishing, reluctant to let go?

It might be that certain people were born with a compulsion to complicate their lives, while others could live blissfully motionless almost indefinitely, like lizards in the sun, too indolent to blink their eyes. Perhaps it was his misfortune, or good fortune, whichever way one looked at it, to belong to the former group, and he was struggling unconsciously to build up pressure in a world which demanded none, which was positively antagonistic to it.

And then again perhaps the reason why he couldn't find time to do any of the things he had planned to do after retirement: reading, roaming, gardening, lying on his back and watching the clouds go by, was because he didn't want to do them. There was no compulsion behind them. They could be done or left undone and nobody really gave a damn. During all his busy life he had only done things which had to be done. This habit had become so fixed over the years that it seemed futile to do anything for which no one was waiting.