I was looking for the “always convalescent from some small illness” quotation a few days ago and found it (where else?) on Alan Jacobs blog. Recording it here for the next time I’m looking for it:

In the work that would make his name as one of the finest medievalists of his generation, The Allegory of Love (1936), he pauses at the end of a learned exposition of the poems of Ariosto and Tasso to make a confession: Samuel Johnson, [C.S. Lewis] says, “once described the ideal happiness he would choose, if he were regardless of futurity” — that is, if he did not need to consider any future consequences of his choice. “My own choice, with the same reservation, would be to read the Italian epic – to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read these poems eight hours of each happy day.”