This essay revisits John Updike’s dystopian novel Toward the End of Time twenty-five years after its initial publication. Attributing harsh initial reviews, in part, to the discomfort one might feel with the “unpleasant realities of aging,” the essay argues that the novel, which begins in 2020, when the United States has been defeated in a global war, but flashes back to events from the dawn of humankind, can be viewed as a meditation by the aging protagonist on “what it feels like” to “be trapped within a deteriorating body” near the end of life. As such, it can strike a personal chord with those who, having read it when it was first published, return to it years later with new perspectives on the aging process.