Aging & Wisdom Quote by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh turns money from society's scoreboard into a curse object: useful only in the act of disposal, dangerous the moment you cling to it. The simile is doing sly, class-conscious work. "Old Maid" is a children's game of forced circulation, a lesson in social anxiety dressed up as play: you want the burden to move along, you want to be seen passing it, and the final humiliation belongs to the one left holding the "wrong" card. By casting money as that card, Waugh mocks the bourgeois fantasy that accumulation equals security. Hoarding isn't prudence here; it's social failure, proof you couldn't convert cash into the only things his world respects - ease, hospitality, status, pleasure, influence.

The intent isn't a hippie sermon against wealth; it's a Catholic-tinged, upper-class sneer at money treated as an end in itself. Waugh wrote in an interwar-to-postwar Britain where old hierarchies were wobbling and "new money" had to announce itself loudly. His fiction is full of people buying their way into belonging, and being betrayed by the fact that money can't purchase taste or absolution. The subtext: money is a token that must be transmuted into relationships, experiences, patronage, even sin - anything but raw possession - or it becomes evidence of spiritual and social impotence.

There's also a darker punchline. If money is only "useful" when gotten rid of, modern capitalism's moral logic gets inverted: the winner is the spender, the loser the saver. Waugh lets the joke sting because it lands uncomfortably close to truth in a culture where value is performance, not possession.