John Keats on a way to lead a “very pleasant life,” advice I’ve followed without knowing of its existence until now

John Keats wrote this to J H Reynolds, a friend and poet, on 19 February 1818 “I have an idea that a man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner—let him on any certain day read a Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it—until it becomes stale—but when will it do so? Never—when man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting post towards all “the two-and thirty Pallaces.”[possibly a reference to Buddhism] How happy is such a “voyage of conception,” what delicious diligent Indolence.” Anybody who knows me well will know how this passage delights me—for it describes how I live. As I’ve written in several places, 1 2 I start each day with reading for 90-120 minutes. I read fiction, then non-fiction (sometimes philosophy), then poetry. The books must be good. If I stumble upon a bad book, I give…