Wit & Attitude Quote by George Jean Nathan

Nathan’s line is a scalpel aimed at America’s favorite secular religion: the moral glamour of busyness. “Constant labor” isn’t just work; it’s work as identity, work as penance, work as proof you deserve to exist. He calls that life “wasted” not because labor is inherently degrading, but because unbroken toil crowds out the things that make a life legible from the inside: pleasure, idleness, friendship, art, contradiction. The sting lands in the caveat: “save a man be such a fool...” Nathan pretends to grant an exception, then uses it to sharpen the insult. If you think the payoff for years of self-erasure is a “fulsome obituary notice,” you’re not noble, you’re gullible.

The phrase “fulsome” is doing double-duty. It means lavish, but it also carries the whiff of overpraise, the kind that’s cheap because it costs the speaker nothing. Obituaries are society’s final transaction with the compliant: a few inflated adjectives in exchange for a lifetime of obedience. Nathan, an editor steeped in theater criticism and the Mencken-ish tradition of anti-pieties, knows how reputations are manufactured. He’s mocking the idea that posterity is a fair employer, and that public approval is a wage you can bank.

Context matters: early 20th-century modernity sold work as salvation while industrial life made work increasingly mechanical. Nathan’s subtext is brutally contemporary: if your compensation arrives only after you’re dead, you weren’t compensated. You were managed.