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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

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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.’
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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...
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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’
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
[The stomach is grieved by idleness and rejoices in exercise, except when it is full of food. After eating, one should immediately take a little walk but sit down right after that.]
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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).
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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’
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Kierkegaard’s Repetition is a close runner up though (in place of Kenkō).
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
The bookish corollary: Twelfth Night Herodotus Anatomy of Melancholy (or Tristram Shandy if you don’t need a door stopper) Tsurezuregusa The Little Virtues
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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
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Still waiting for the other shoe to drop on this.
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
The evening sun faintly dapples a meadow surrounded by trees in springtime. The young upper leaves of the maple trees are vivid acid green.
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Super, thank you!
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Which is your favorite (at the moment)? (Am thinking of rereading with multiple versions and am looking for recommendations.)
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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.
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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.
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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’).
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Reposted by M.F. Corwin
M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
Remember the Armenians.
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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.
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
(I should mention that I am still working on proofreading, so I apologize in advance for any awkwardnesses that are not the poet’s own.)
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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.
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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)
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
‘Become the imitable thing’ —William James, ‘The Gospel of Relaxation’
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Spell check wants to change ‘bibliometrische’ to ‘bibliomantische’.
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
‘Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface’ —William James, ‘On Vital Reserves’
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 22/02/2026
Morning books are the perfect present to oneself: they break up mammoth books into digestible gobbets while also seeding the day with a sense of accomplishment.
A photograph of books and journals, including the DSM-5, a history of English hospitals, Anatomy of Melancholy, Foucault on the clinic, a book on werewolves, and Montaigne, all very uplifting.
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
(I do not agree with this approach, let it be noted. Just stood out in the daily reading.)
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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
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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.
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
A view of a meadow bound by trees, covered with a thin layer of snow. A small cabin is faintly visible through the trees, its roof white with snow.
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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’
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 28/11/2025
Label makers are one of life’s underrated pleasures – they add an increment of joy to the quotidian.
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
The autumn field yielding to the bounds of winter, the leaves now scattered solely on the ground, the evergreens a dark horizon.
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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
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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’)
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 27/10/2025
Autumn advances across in the meadow in shades of gold and russet.
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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.
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 16/10/2025
Carefully.
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
(Mostly I just liked the picture though)
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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’.
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
An autumnal meadow, although most of the leaves are still green.
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
I really like discontent.
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M.F. Corwin @eudaemonist.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
(I am hoping that this quotation is not currently topical, but am making a note of it because I really like Burton’s use of ‘prank up’ and ‘trot about’ here. None so sweet.)
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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’
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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
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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.
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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’
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