And coming closer with ridiculous haste. In fact you start to feel a bit of a dupe every time you open your eyes and get out of bed. The psychic clock (people have written about this) definitely accelerates…After I turned sixty my birthdays became biannual, then triannual. The Atlantic Monthly gradually became a fortnightly; and now it’s the Atlantic Weekly. Just lately, I shave, or feel as though I shave, every day (and I provably don’t shave every day). In the New York Times the op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman used to appear on Wednesdays only, but now he writes a piece every twenty-four hours (following the example of Gail Collins and Paul Krugman); and when it’s bad, I seem to be settling down to these authors, over a leisurely breakfast (fruit, cereal, softboiled egg), every forty-five minutes.