He must have felt, as I did when I arrived at that age and station some decades later, that he was getting older before his time, that—like the astronaut in the final sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey—he could look across the room and see the old man he was going to become, huddled over a soup dish, or tucked into a bed with the covers up to his chin, laboring to breathe. He decided to get some exercise.
