What a life-affirming ambition from my third candidate for a nuannaarpoq award, John Keats. He didn’t live long but he did live, squeezing every drop of enjoyment he could out of a life that was beset and ultimately curtailed by illness – his own and others’.

‘I will clamber through the clouds and exist. I will get such an accumulation of stupendous recollections that as I walk through the suburbs of London I may not see them.’  (8 April 1818)

Source: John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford World Classics, 2002/2009), p. 79

Photo credit: Larisa-K at pixabay