In a Superior Civilization

The other day, I pulled from the shelf a copy of August Frugé's A Skeptic Among Scholars, a memoir of his work at The University of California Press, and happened on a passage from one of the authors he worked with, Rico Lebrun:

The real drama is in the fact that personal drama produces nothing of merit whatever. Many professors have struggled even harder than Cézanne, and for the wrong reasons. In a superior civilization someday, we should have a Pantheon for them: "He was an ass and toiled as if he had the obligations of a hero." Who knows how many of us may yet belong to that legion?

 (Rico Lebrun, Drawings.)

But what of us too idle to qualify for that Pantheon?