The portrait of a scholar (uh-oh…)
“Imagine that you oppose to him [the carefree fool] some paragon of wisdom, a man who has devoted his entire youth and early manhood to acquiring the arts and sciences, who has lost the best part of his existence in perpetual study, pain, and anxiety, who has not enjoyed in all the rest of his life so much as a scintilla of pleasure, always sparing, saving, sad, solemn, severe, and strict on himself, morose and melancholy with others, afflicted with a pallid complexion, a gaunt figure, a stooped posture, premature senility and white hairs, departing life before his time. Though in fact what does it matter when a man of this sort dies, since he can’t properly be said ever to have lived? There’s the portrait of your wise man.”
Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, 38
