Sign in

M.F. Corwin

@eudaemonist.bsky.social
142 followers 108 following 146 posts

‘I confess it as a besetting infirmity of mine that I am too much of an Eudaemonist: I hanker too much after a state of happiness, both for myself and others.’ —Thos. de Quincey, ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater’ www.eudaemonist.com

PostsRepliesMedia
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
‘For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.’
0204
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
A photograph from above Timberline Lodge, looking vaguely southeasterly, in hopes of seeing clear plumes of wildfire smoke, but there is too much low-elevation fog and cloud cover to do so. The air is very hazy with smoke.
042
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
‘Eating too much cabbage may be a form of gluttony, but it doesn’t carry much moral opprobrium or significance beyond that’ —Paul Freedman (‘Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination’, p. 159)
061
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
The sunlight on the trees is red gold, and the hills are veiled in smoke. There is a flash of motion and a spotted towhee settles on a nearby branch, its speckles dulled as though already covered in ash. The fire is on the other side of the mountain, but the fragility of things seems much closer.
0121
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
All we like sheep. www.eudaemonist.com/22vi2026/
eudaemonist.com
an eudæmonist : high places
Senes hieme velut oves aprica petant, aestate velut aves amoena rivosque revisant. Frequenter inter virentes versentur plantas et suaviter redolentes, hae namque viventes spirantesque conspirant ad sp...
040
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
‘The grey early morning, when body and soul are only narrowly held together by a cup of coffee, is anyhow no time for conversation, anywhere, in any circumstance’ —Ethel Mannin, ‘An American Journey’
050
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
I am enjoying Ficino’s advice for the prevention of melancholy through the proper care of the knowledge worker: ‘Otio maeret stomachus, exercitatione gaudet, nisi dum cibo sit plenus. Sumpto cibo statim modice deambulandum, mox vero sedendum’ (‘Three Books on Life’, I.11).
140
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
‘…and still / The book-club, guarded from your modern trick / Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease, / Preserved her intellectual.’ —E.B. Browning, ‘Aurora Leigh’
051
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
What five movies would you tell people to watch to get to know who you are and how you feel and think in the world? Modern Times Yojimbo The Thin Man Stalker Howl’s Moving Castle
280
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
Meeting up with old friends.
A black and white photograph of a very old stump in a much younger forest with very little undergrowth.
1120
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
Another walk along the river.
A photograph of a mountain river on a fine spring morning, the sun still a promise on the horizon, with a faint mist in the distance. The water swirls in choppy white eddies over the rocks laid bare by winter storms, hemmed in by the trunks of fallen trees.
0110
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
Thinking back over the books I’ve finished reading so far this year, and Auden’s ‘The Dyer’s Hand’ and Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ stand out as the best, but Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s ‘Recollections of Gustav Mahler’ is definitely the funniest (well, ‘most amusing’).
080
Reposted by M.F. Corwin
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
Remember the Armenians.
051
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
Hanging out with my most toxic neighbor.
A color photograph of a toxic newt standing on some asphalt in the Pacific Northwest, staring into bleak futurity.
060
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
Do you need more mediocre verse from the late nineteenth century in your life? Yes, of course you do. Special guest criticism by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Jack Kerouac. www.eudaemonist.com/biblion/marz...
eudaemonist.com
Marzials: Poems
Specimens of poetry by Theo Marzials, hanger-on at the British Museum, composer, and general oddity.
172
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
‘There are types of character which are like a prism, whose various and brilliant colours are but broken reflections of a single ray of concentrated light’ —R.H. Tawney (‘Religion and the Rise of Capitalism’, p. 156)
051
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
‘Become the imitable thing’ —William James, ‘The Gospel of Relaxation’
010
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Spell check wants to change ‘bibliometrische’ to ‘bibliomantische’.
030
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
‘Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface’ —William James, ‘On Vital Reserves’
061
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
‘Nor hope to be my self less miserable By what I seek, but others to make such As I, though thereby worse to me redound: For onely in destroying I find ease To my relentless thoughts’ —Milton, ‘Paradise Lost’, IX.126–130
251
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
Brambles covered in hoarfrost, with a blurry view of a frost-covered meadow in the background, along with a hint of blue sky and some evergreens.
051
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
‘So there’s an end to that—it’s commonplace: light goes with life, and in the winter of your years the dark comes early…’ —Tom Stoppard, ‘Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead’
050
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 09/11/2025
‘Somehow his memory irritates me! He possessed the truth and answered to the heavenly calling, and yet always without joy and almost always without grace. His puerility, as you say, was heartrending.’ —Edmund Gosse, unimpressed with Andrew Lang in a letter to Henry James
040
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
‘Opposite to exercise is idleness (the badge of gentry) or want of exercise, the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, stepmother of discipline, the chief author of all mischief….’ —Robert Burton (‘Anatomy of Melancholy’)
070
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
‘Of seasons of the year, the autumn is most melancholy’ —Robert Burton, ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’, 1.1.3.2
A slash a blue sky visible behind silhouetted trees, with splashes of yellow and gold and red leaves below.
071
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
Ulrich von Hutten’s poem ‘Nemo’ (nemo, nam, nemo omnibus horis sapit, etc.) is briefly quoted in ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, and it reminded me of: ‘Well, one time when things was looking bright I started to whittling on a stick one night Who said, “Hey! That's dynamite!”? Nobody.’
Engraved frontispiece to Ulrich von Hutton’s ‘Nemo’, which is mentioned in Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’.
130
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
An autumnal meadow, although most of the leaves are still green.
1120
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
‘Some prank up their bodies, and have their minds full of execrable vices. Some trot about to bear false witness, and say anything for money; and though judges know of it, yet for a bribe they wink at it, and suffer false contracts to prevail against equity.’ —Burton, ‘Democritus Jr. to the Reader’
151
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
‘The natural dreariness of the place is not a little increased by the melancholy croakings of innumerable penguins with which the Shore is lined. Nature seems to have designed this Spot solely for the use of Sea Lions, Seals, penguins and Sea Fowls.’ —James Burney, Journals, 25.xii.1776
030
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 21/09/2025
A moment’s pause while tidying.
A photograph of two stacks of small hardcover books, showing the the cream or milky tea colored text blocks, some decked, some warped, all more or less well-thumbed. Tolstoy on the left and Florio’s Montaigne and other early modern marvels (in early twentieth-century multi-volume editions) on the right.
081
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
‘As readers, most of us, to some degree, are like those urchins who pencil mustaches on the faces of girls in advertisements’ —Auden, ‘Reading’, in ‘The Dyer’s Hand’
040
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 13/09/2025
‘There’s really no point in writing normal novels’ —Yoko Tawada, ‘Exophony’ (trans. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda), p. 81
040
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
‘Why novels have to follow the logic of department stores is beyond me’ —Yoko Tawada, ‘Exophony’ (trans. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, p. 54)
050
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 09/09/2025
John Constable, study of clouds, October 1822; in his words: ‘looking S.E. noon. Wind very brisk. & effect bright & fresh. Clouds. moving very fast. With occasional very bright openings to the blue’.
091
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 07/09/2025
If you are looking for creepy stories about ghosts, uncanny children, and other oddities, I cannot recommend M.R. James’s translation of ‘The Apocryphal New Testament: Being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses with Other Narratives and Fragments’ enough. Snarky notes a bonus.
051
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 06/09/2025
‘To grow bigger every moment in your own conceit, and the world to lessen: to deify yourself at the expense of your species; to judge the world—this is the acme and supreme point of your mystery—these the true PLEASURES of SULKINESS.’ —Charles Lamb, ‘Popular Fallacies’ no. XVI
072
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
August was a somewhat slow reading month. Standouts include James C. Scott, ‘The Art of Not Being Governed’; Marguerite Yourcenar, ‘The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays’; and finally finishing Tolkien’s diplomatic edition of ‘Ancrene Wisse’. www.eudaemonist.com/biblio/2025-...
eudaemonist.com
2025
040
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
Study of Cirrus Clouds, ca. 1820 by John Constable, currently held by the V&A. A painting in oils of mostly wispy clouds against a remote blue sky. The painting is surrounded by a cream colored border that is not part of the painting but rather the surface on which it was photographed.
0166
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
‘How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of all freedom!’ —Gaston Bachelard, ‘The Poetics of Space’, trans. Maria Jolas
020
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
Evening books. ‘Magic Mountain’ is not as clever as I recall it being. ‘A Monk’s Guide to a Clean House and Mind’ is the best text about cleanings toilets I’ve encountered save for ‘Perfect Days’. Lamb is cute. Bachelard is not setting things on fire. ‘The Candidate’ is unsettling. Zambreno is fine.
A stack of books on a bedside table, with volumes by Kate Zambreno, Shoukei Matsumoto, Charles Lamb, Gaston Bachelard, Thomas Mann, and Zareh Vorpouni. There are some bookmarks visible that show the (limited) progress of a sleepy reader. The image is probably oversaturated and out of focus, but note the mention of a sleepy reader, which may be relevant on this point.
190
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
There is a Shame of Nobleness— Confronting Sudden Pelf— A finer Shame of Ecstasy— Convicted of Itself—
171
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
A little wilderness experience.
A black dog faces a dirt path and a misty wilderness next to mountain lake.
090
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
In other information retrieval news, punch cards are also very good bookmarks.
A photograph of an unused punched card being used as a bookmark in a copy of Tolkein's diplomatic edition of the Ancrene Wisse, with a rather dirty rug in the background.
171
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
John Constable, Cloud study with birds in flight, 1821; a low line of land above which four birds sour, small and high, against a partly cloudy sky
24712
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
A good set of morning books at the moment: autonomy at the peripheries, Marxist Romantics, regional cults (with bonus spicy academic drama), wrenchfule wicchecreftes, and, you know, commodities.
A stack of books including, from the bottom up: James C. Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed”, Anahid Nersessian’s “Calamity Form”, David Braund’s “Greek Religion and Cults in the Black Sea Region”, Tolkien’s diplomatic edition of “Ancrene Wisse”, and Marx, “Capital”, vol. 2.
030
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
One can get a fair amount of reading done by reducing one’s daily allotment of doomscrolling. www.eudaemonist.com/biblio/2025-...
eudaemonist.com
2025
070
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 26/07/2025
Any time I find a line of poetry I like, I think: ‘That’s good; “mobled queen” is good.’
040
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
‘I have never made an acquaintance since, that lasted; or a friendship, that answered; with any that had not some tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding.’ —Charles Lamb, ‘All Fools’ Day’
061