M.F. Corwin

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.

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.

(I do not agree with this approach, let it be noted. Just stood out in the daily reading.)

‘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

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.

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.

the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy

‘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’

Label makers are one of life’s underrated pleasures – they add an increment of joy to the quotidian.

The autumn field yielding to the bounds of winter, the leaves now scattered solely on the ground, the evergreens a dark horizon.

‘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

‘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’)

Autumn advances across in the meadow in shades of gold and russet.

A slash a blue sky visible behind silhouetted trees, with splashes of yellow and gold and red leaves below.

‘Of seasons of the year, the autumn is most melancholy’ —Robert Burton, ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’, 1.1.3.2

Carefully.

(Mostly I just liked the picture though)

Engraved frontispiece to Ulrich von Hutton’s ‘Nemo’, which is mentioned in Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’.

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.’

An autumnal meadow, although most of the leaves are still green.

I really like discontent.

(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.)

‘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’

‘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

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.

A moment’s pause while tidying.

‘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’

‘There’s really no point in writing normal novels’ —Yoko Tawada, ‘Exophony’ (trans. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda), p. 81

‘Why novels have to follow the logic of department stores is beyond me’ —Yoko Tawada, ‘Exophony’ (trans. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, p. 54)

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’.

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.

‘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

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-...