Hythlodaeus

"But yet to despise the comeliness of beauty, to waste the bodily strength, to turn nimbleness into sluggishness, to consume and make feeble the body with fasting, to do injury to health, and to reject the pleasant motions of nature--

[Hey!  Is he talking about graduate students or academics here?  Just add the bad clothes and bad hair.] 

--else for a vain shadow of virtue for the wealth and profit of no man, to punish himself, or to the intent he may be able courageously to suffer adversity (which perchance shall never come to him)--

[Or when it comes, it will be in a form, size, scope he never could have predicted or prepared for.]

--this to do they think it a point of extreme madness, and a token of a man cruelly minded towards himself and unkind towards nature, as one so disdaining to be in her danger, that he renounceth  and refuseth all her benefits."

(More, Utopia.  Translated by Ralph Robinson, 1556)

What I want to know is, how did I manage to spend so many years convinced of what the Utopians find so ridiculous?  Of course life is for pleasure; to what other end could we have been made?

--well, at least it's a fun idea to think about.  Considering that it's all narrated by "Mr. Nonsense."