He feels foolish and wonders if the people around him realize that old age doesn’t automatically confer boundless wisdom and goodness upon a person, though he remembers believing this once, that everyone older than him should by virtue of their age automatically act better than him. At every stage in his life, he’d thought the next one would bring a feeling of having it all figured out, but it only tended to bring a feeling of having more to figure out than he had ever realized.
