One should live one’s life in a way that the passage of time can’t be felt at all. The key is to keep yourself busy with unimportant things, and one day you’ll be no more. A mature man knows this fact very well and therefore keeps himself busy with things that shouldn’t, after all, matter to him.
At school I was a nuisance, for my father was now Chairman of our Continuation School Board, and I affected airs of near-equality with the teacher that must have galled her; I wanted to argue about everything, expand everything, and generally turn every class into a Socratic powwwow instead of getting on with the curriculum. Probably I made her nervous, as a pupil full of green, fermenting information is so well able to do. I have dealt with many innumerable variations of my younger self in classrooms since then, and have mentally apologized for my tiresomeness.