Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden lands the punchline like a moral diagnosis: the transaction isn’t sex so much as relief from the terror of being dull. “Large sums” tilts the line toward economic satire, reminding you that this is a market, with prices set not by lust alone but by insecurity. “Whores” is deliberately unsoftened diction, forcing the reader away from romance and toward the blunt mechanics of exchange. Then he springs the trap: what’s being bought is a story, a small, expertly tailored fiction - “you are not bores” - delivered with the practiced intimacy of someone paid to mirror you back as interesting.

The subtext is cruel and modern: bourgeois men fear ordinariness more than sin. Auden implies that the client’s real hunger is for a witness who will certify his charm, his significance, his exceptionality. The prostitute becomes a professional editor of male self-image, supplying what wives, friends, or society won’t reliably provide: unconditional fascination on demand. It’s also a jab at masculinity’s performance anxiety. The worst insult isn’t impotence; it’s banality.

Context matters. Auden writes out of an era steeped in class propriety and sexual hypocrisy, where respectable surfaces hid private compulsions. Coming from a poet attuned to the ways people mythologize themselves, the line reads as a compressed theory of modern loneliness: we’ll pay dearly not to be desired, but to be narrated as worth desiring. The real commodity is attention that flatters - proof, however staged, that one’s life isn’t a tedious footnote.