Life & Wisdom Quote by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh treats "news" like a disposable stimulant for the spiritually undernourished: something you ingest not because you care, but because you don’t. The jab lands in that very Waugh way - elegant cruelty aimed at modern life’s most respectable addiction. Calling the reader "a chap" is doing quiet work here. It’s clubby and dismissive, implying a certain comfortable class that can afford not to care, and a press that caters to that detachment by turning the world into manageable, consumable items.

The second line sharpens the knife: news exists only in the moment before it’s absorbed. Once read, it’s "dead", stripped of urgency and moral claim. Waugh is pointing to the peculiar alchemy of journalism: it converts catastrophe, politics, and human stakes into a brief sensation of being informed, then leaves nothing behind except the itch for the next update. It’s not just that stories age quickly; it’s that the act of reading can function as a kind of burial. You’ve acknowledged the event, so you feel finished with it.

Context matters. Waugh wrote through an era of mass newspapers, radio bulletins, and wartime propaganda, when "being informed" became a civic posture and a social credential. His suspicion isn’t anti-information so much as anti-spectatorship. He’s skewering the way news flatters its audience: it offers the feeling of engagement without the cost of commitment, a daily ritual that replaces conviction with consumption.