Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.

The quip argues that professed eagerness for death is usually theoretical—an attitude formed “from the ears up,” i.e., in the head, from talk, ideas, or secondhand notions, rather than from genuine experience. Mizner implies that once death is no longer an intellectual concept but an immediate prospect, most people’s bravado evaporates. The line also satirizes a certain kind of world-weary affectation: to “welcome death” can be a way of performing sophistication or despair. By reducing that posture to mere mental chatter, Mizner reasserts the primacy of embodied fear and the instinct to live.