Newly minted in manhood, a university student concluded that he
might better his odds of attracting the opposite sex by equipping
himself with bulging muscles. He would transform lithesome legs into
sturdy supports, square shoulders into the triangular pivot of a bear's
back, and ripple his abdomen like a reptile's. He learned the locations
and functions of dorsals, pectorals, deltoids and such, contemplating from within and without his -ceps, -strings and -ibia. Squashed on a bench, he pulled with his heels, levered iron bars to his buttocks, hauled lead from his wrists to his armpits, and pushed up from his chest the metallic equivalent of his body mass. Above him, the ceiling swam in vision troubled by oxygen deprivation and sweat. He jammed his toes into the floor to support calves lifting the bulk of two men, bent to row laterally and frontally along streams of steel. His neck became
practised in circular presses against pads as heavy as an ox's yoke.
His trunk coiled and uncoiled as he hung like a bat with his feet
attached to a pole. He methodically worked opposing muscle groups
in successions of endless repetitions, the whole punctuated with
grunts and groans and shivers and moans.

After three months, he changed the sizes in his wardrobe; six more
and he was a strutting hulk only slightly less stiff than a seasoned
board, who digested protein to rival the most ravenous carnivores. He
dressed in short shirts, and when practical, in short-shorts. The floor
thumped as he walked. The furniture bumped and banged
in the rooms.

Alas, the temporal claims of approaching examinations made him
sacrifice his daily routine. Marathon stints in the library banished to
remembrance's realm all those diligent hours spent in the gym. With
the summer exam period nearly past, his belt began to go its own way,
heading south, pulled in mysterious attraction to the student's shoe-
tops. One morning, he slumped in his chair, gaping in dismay. There-
warm, round, cheerful and robust, was a gentle swelling, the
unmistakable excrescence of an incipient paunch. The fruits of his
bodybuilding had grown overripe. His ursine chest had acquired the lilt
and the shake of budding breasts. Beneath the globular roll of his
belly had materialised a revoltingly soft, surreptitious rubbing
of his thighs.

The pressures of study kept the gym out of reach, and even a fervent
effort to cut his calorific intake brought no more than irascibility,
gnawed fingernails and chewed pencil tips. By the end of the school
term, he had no heart for a daily regimen, for what would be a lifelong
sentence to strenuous, unforgiving bodily maintenance. Bushels of
salad and a blend of diverse, outdoor exertions eventually eased him
back into his clothes; but the shock of sudden corpulence had
sparked other insights.

He began to perceive in the engineering disciplines a monomaniacal
rigour, and to ask what could be said of a subject for study and what
could not. He learned to explore a painting with his senses before
pronouncing on its author, and to render cubist tricks on the back of a
matchbook. He came to recognise in certain expository tracts the
slippery sibilance of justification or spiteful whining, and identified
dissimulated machinations and surreptitious agendas in writings
produced prior to major historical events. The constants of social
endeavour peeking out beneath discourse began to intrigue him;
while any professorial declarations that values were but points of view
made him laugh. Mathematics resolved into an increasingly refined
manner of speaking about time and space. His teacher's words
  detached themselves from their arguments to describe the men and women who spoke them, to comment on the failings and strengths of minds given to abstraction, yet entirely insecure in deed.

At the close of his ultimate university year, the student looked directly at
the responsibilities of career extending like a long, shining slide, and with sadness caught the glowing eyes of the girl with whom he had shared two years of hot, emotional union. He told everyone concerned that some brief business required his presence on a foreign shore.
Much of his life has elapsed; and still he has not looked behind.