Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman Reilly Raine

Raine’s line lands like a joke with a blade inside it: the “fat stomach” isn’t just a body, it’s a built-in blindfold. The image is bluntly physical, almost cartoonish - a gut so prominent it blocks the view - but the real target is psychological. Comfort, excess, self-absorption, even status: all of it becomes literal obstruction. You can’t look down, which is to say you can’t really notice the ground-level realities you’re walking through.

As a screenwriter, Raine thinks in visuals and staging. He takes an abstract moral (complacency makes you ignorant) and turns it into blocking: the body interrupts the camera line. It’s the kind of metaphor that plays in a single shot: a character tries to peer downward, the belly wins. That concreteness is the intent. He wants the audience to feel the insult in their ribs, not admire it from a distance.

The subtext is social, not merely personal. “What is going on around you” hints at the ignored world: the labor that feeds comfort, the people literally below your eye line, the mess you can afford not to see. It’s a critique of privilege disguised as a quip about overeating, and it carries a faintly moralistic bite typical of early-to-mid 20th-century popular writing, when bodily “softness” was often coded as civic or masculine weakness.

It works because it’s unfair in a recognizably human way: it makes you laugh, then makes you check whether your own ease has been narrowing your field of vision.