https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/11/01/john-keats-on-negative-capability/

In the introduction to Selected Letters, Jon Mee writes of the letters themselves as a meta-embodiment of “Negative Capability”:

The provisionality of the correspondence might be taken as a triumphant demonstration of negative capability, recording Keats’s ability to project himself into different roles and live in a state of creative uncertainty, but these letters also seem to express a deep sense of insecurity, which frequently took the form of a desire to escape the fever and the fret of the life around him.

Perhaps Christoph Niemann was right, after all, in asserting that insecurity is essential to creativity.

All of Keats’s surviving letters to his family and friends are available as a free ebook.

 

“Attention without feeling,” Mary Oliver wrote in her beautiful elegy for her soul mate, “is only a report.” To fully feel life course through us, indeed, we ought to befriend our own attention, that “intentional, unapologetic discriminator.”

I have spent the day with a friend helping them to do a factory reset on a new phone after they forgot the password
Then we  did the rubbish and put some new light bulbs in,talked about WW1 and a few other things and suddenly it was the evening!
The days are longer, I can tell now.I am waiting for a new doorbell  ringers to come as  one of my ringers broke and I can’t hear  when I am upstairs so I can put  a new one on the landing….I.
What a  pest they are.Sometimes people phone me from the doorstep.They promise miracles but none really last for long. I must check all 3 ringers immediately.

When I was 9 months old  my mother was taking me out in my  pram.A  neighbour stopped and asked her something.When I replied the poor woman nearly fainted

At last a after many years I have discovered why my brothers hated me.My mother was teaching mt older brothers to read  [4 and 5  years old] I know!!
When they were slow she would point to me sitting by the fire reading  a Rubert Book.I was only three.
But talking too early is not a good thing.It means youw ere not a baby for long enough

Anyway  when I was five I decided the school was boring.I asked what a University was and liked the sound of it.So I asked to go there instead
What a disappointment  I had to spend 13 more years in school where we spent Friday afternoon cleaning ink wells and polishing our desks
Do you think any school now could let chidlren spend two hours polishing the furniture?We loved it

 

In my last year at  the primary school I was allowed to spend all afternoon reading…I loved that
In the morning the teacher gave me arithmetic booklets with problems in which I worked through at the ba ck of the room

Then I passed the 11 plus and  had to spend 5 years in a grammar school being taught the stuff that I’d  done in 1 year
Schools are prisonsi

At least I know what compound interest is