Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?
Keats wrote this in a long letter to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana in the spring of 1819, one of the hardest stretches of his short life. His brother Tom had died of tuberculosis just months before, he had no steady income, and the same disease that would eventually kill him was already settling into his own lungs. Rather than despair, Keats reimagined suffering itself as a kind of schooling, the means by which an ordinary mind becomes a fully realized soul. It is a strikingly modern idea: that resilience is not about escaping pain but about letting it shape you into someone more fully yourself.
Reflection
Keats believed pain and struggle could shape a person into someone more fully themselves. What challenge on my plate today could I treat as part of my own soul-making?