Nuggets of Wisdom

The Passionate State of Mind: 

And Other Aphorisms 

by Eric Hoffer

"Every intense desire is perhaps basically a desire to be different from what we are." - Eric Hoffer







This book is characterized by its concise and impactful statements. Each aphorism is a nugget of wisdom, often challenging conventional thinking and offering fresh perspectives on familiar themes. This format makes it a book that can be savored slowly, with each sentence prompting reflection. Hoffer's aphorisms are not always comforting or predictable. He often presents paradoxes and challenges readers to question their assumptions about themselves and the world around them.

One of the main themes, as the title implies, is how emotions, especially strong ones like passion, love, hate, fear, and vanity, influence both individual behavior and large-scale movements. Hoffer investigates the causes, expressions, and effects of these.

Hoffer's strength is his capacity to condense difficult concepts into straightforward but impactful assertions. He makes observations on a wide range of subjects, such as self-worth, leadership, creativity, social change, and the nature of belief, based on his extensive reading and firsthand experiences as a longshoreman.

Even though "The Passionate State of Mind" was written decades ago, its insights are still relevant today. His insights on the dynamics of social unrest, the pursuit of belonging, and fanaticism are still remarkably applicable today.

The Sublimity of Humanity

 

Man the Creator

Nature attains perfection, but man never does. There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished. He is both an unfinished animal and an unfinished man. It is this incurable unfinishedness which sets man apart from other living things. For, in the attempt to finish himself, man becomes a creator. Moreover, the incurable unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable of learning and growing.

Reflections on the Human Condition by Eric Hoffer. Harper & Row, New York, 1973. p 3

Insight and Inspiration

Here are five of my favorite non-fiction books, all of them short but overflowing with quality.  They have provided continual insight, ideas, and inspiration for my life. I present them in approximately the order in which they entered my reading life.

The True Believer: 

Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

by Eric Hoffer

I have read this book several times over the years, starting the summer before I entered college when it was assigned reading for the incoming Freshman class. It is a classic in the sense that it both retains a freshness upon rereading and succeeds in challenging the reader with the thoughts that it presents. Insightful regarding the nature of those who join mass movements, Hoffer's observations are timeless.

The Immense Journey

by Loren Eiseley

While studying the History of Science as an undergraduate I was introduced to the writings of Loren Eiseley.  In this small but profound book he shares personal notes and we slowly come to realize that Eiseley is not just talking about his own life’s journey. Eiseley’s narrator creates a metaphor for the journey of all humankind through the vast dimension of time and space—a journey filled with perplexity, delight, and impermanence. 

Man's Unconquerable Mind

by Gilbert Highet

I also discovered the thoughts of Highet while in College. He explores the power, capabilities, and limitations of the human mind throughout the ages, highlighting the wonders created by the great thinkers of the ages, all the while keeping in mind the tortures that Prometheus endured for giving Man the gift of fire.

In Bluebeard's Castle:

 Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture

by George Steiner

George Steiner was (he died this month) a protean thinker writing about tragedy, the classics and more over his career.  This short book is an intellectual tour de force, that  generates both a profound excitement and promotes a profound unease…like the great culturalists of the past.  Steiner uses a dense and plural learning to assess his topic: his book has the outstanding quality of being not simply a reflection on culture, but an embodiment of certain contemporary resources within it.

Sailing Alone around the World

by Joshua Slocum

More than one hundred years ago at the end of the century prior to the last a fifty-one year old man set sail for a trip around the world. Joshua Slocum capped his sea-going career with this trip in a sail boat, named "The Spray", that he built himself and, upon his return, he memorialized his trip by writing this narrative. His career had waned with the gradual demise of large sail-going ships and he put all of his years of experience on them, plus some help from friends and strangers along the way, into this voyage. The story he told about it still has power to grip the reader's imagination yet today. The result is one of the most inspirational books I've ever read.

Quotation of the Day

"Nature attains perfection, but man never does.  There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished.  He is both an unfinished animal and an unfinished man.  It is this incurable unfinishedness which sets man apart from other living things.  For, in the attempt to finish himself, man becomes a creator.   Moreover, the incurable unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable of learning and growing."

-- Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition

The Original Essayist

The Complete Essays 
by Michel de Montaigne



“I speak the truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more as I grow older.” 

"When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind."
  
-   Michel de Montaigne 

This is a difficult book to review, not because it is difficult to read or comprehend but rather because it is so exceptionally comprehensive in its topics and thoughts and ideas. In one sense it began in 1571 when Michel de Montaigne, suffering increasingly from melancholy, retired to the library tower on his estate in the Périgord, and began to write what we know now as his Essays. At the age of thirty-eight he could look out his windows to see over his estates and check if his men were shirking their work. Inscribed on the walls and beams of his tower room were about 60 maxims in Greek and Latin taken from the philosophers. He replaced and augmented them as his moods and his reading led him.

In this room Montaigne produced three significantly different editions of his endlessly growing essays. By his death in 1592 he had scrawled in the margins of his copy of the most recent edition a significant set of further revisions, which were printed in a modified form in 1595. Montaigne wrote on a wide range of topics -- education, cannibals, drunkenness, war-horses, repentance, thumbs -- and he wrote in a highly readable, thoroughly skeptical way. The roof-beam carvings of his "solarium" convey his general frame of mind and include sayings like these: "The plague of man is the opinion of knowledge. I establish nothing. I do not understand. I halt. I examine. Breath fills a goatskin as opinion fills an hollow head. Not more this than that -- why this and not that? Have you seen a man that believes himself wise? Hope that he is a fool. Man, a vase of clay. I am Human, let nothing human be foreign to me."

The essays that he wrote defined the form of his thought while providing a window into both his mind and his life. Through his essays he has influenced writers and thinkers in every place and century since. One of my favorite examples of those he influenced is the self-taught working-man's philosopher Eric Hoffer who commented on the influence of Montaigne in his life. When on a gold-digging trip to the Sierras he took along a copy of Montaigne's essays. "We were snowed in and I read it straight through three times. I quoted it all the time. I'll bet there are still a dozen hobos in the San Joaquin Valley who can quote Montaigne." Montaigne's collected essays are worth returning to again and again to spur one's own thoughts about living and dying. I have read and enjoyed these essays over most of my adult life.  With them I would also recommend those of Francis Bacon, Emerson, and Orwell, among others.

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Thoughts on Mass Movements

The True Believer: 
Thoughts on the Nature of 
Mass Movements 
by Eric Hoffer


"This book deals with some of the peculiarities common to all mass movements, be they religious movements, social revolutions, or national movements. It does not maintain that all movements are identical, but that they share certain essential characteristics which give them a family likeness." (from the Introduction)


I have read this book several times over the years, starting the summer before I entered college. It is a classic in the sense that it both retains a freshness upon rereading and succeeds in challenging the reader with the thoughts that it presents. I use the word thoughts in the sense that Pascal wrote his own Pensees in the Seventeenth Century. Hoffer's observations on the nature of mass movements are still essential reading for anyone who desires to understand the nature of the twentieth century culture--and even the twenty-first. His short collection of thoughtful essays are divided into four parts: 1)the appeal of mass movements, 2) the potential converts, 3) Self-sacrifice and other unifying agents, and 4) a concluding summing up of some particular aspects of true believers and the movements to which they adhere.

Early in the book Hoffer identifies many true believers as those who seek "substitutes either for the whole self or for the elements which make life bearable and which they cannot evoke out of their individual resources." (p 13) They are people "who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of an individual career cannot stir them to a mighty effort, nor can it evoke in them faith and a single-minded dedication. They look on self-interest as on something tainted and evil; something unclean and unlucky. Anything undertaken under the auspices of the self seems to them foredoomed. Nothing that has its roots and reasons in the self can be noble and good. Their innermost craving is for a new life -- a rebirth -- or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause." (p 12)

The book continues with a focus on Hoffer's analysis of the means used to motivate true believers and bind them together. He concludes his analysis with a discussion of the energumen of those who join both good and bad mass movements. His prose style is at once aphoristic and thoughtful. It is distinguished by a depth that is demonstrated by the breadth of his personal reading and studies. There are references to the thoughts of thinkers as disparate as Epictetus, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Thoreau, Dostoevsky, and many more. His thoughts spurred my thinking more than forty years ago and rereading this short but challenging book continues to raise questions that help me better understand myself and the society around me. Eric Hoffer was a thinker whose writings in this and his several other books helped to shape my personal philosophy of life.

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Everyday Enlightenment

Blue Collar Intellectuals: 
When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America 

by Daniel J. Flynn

"A specific time and place gave rise to blue-collar intellectuals.  Twentieth-century America witnessed a democratization of education unparalleled in human history." and "Blue-collar intellectuals proved as unsettling to the intellectual elite as the nouveau riche had been to old money." (p 10)


I have neither the patience nor the political wonkism to view C-SPAN on a regular basis, but I am a frequent viewer of their cultural programming called BOOKTV on C-SPAN2 weekends. It was there that I saw Daniel J. Flynn lecture on the topic of his enlightening book, Blue Collar Intellectuals. Inspired, I acquired the book and was not disappointed with his stories of five intellectuals, outsiders with uncommon backgrounds, who reached out to "blue collar" people everywhere.
I first encountered one of the five intellectuals included in Flynn's book during my teen years reading science fiction. One of my favorite authors was Ray Bradbury and his tales, especially those of Humans and Martians collected in The Martian Chronicles. Flynn tells of Bradbury's impoverished family background as he grew up in the 1920s and his early reading of Edgar Allan Poe (also a favorite of mine since my pre-teen years) and others like Edgar Rice Burroughs. Even after he became famous for his own fantastic stories Bradbury was considered an outsider in traditional publishing circles, but maintained popularity with everyday folk. Time magazine labelled Bradbury "poet of the pulps" that seemed to sum up the cognoscenti's opinion of him.
My next encounter with the intellectuals that Daniel Flynn depicts did not begin until I was on my way to college at the University of Wisconsin in the summer of 1967. Required reading for all incoming freshmen was a short book by Eric Hoffer, The True Believer. This was my introduction to one of Flynn's "Blue Collar Intellectuals" and to a book that is as relevant today as it was forty-five years ago. While distant from Hoffer in his political philosophy, Milton Friedman shared similar blue collar background and an ability to explain complex ideas of economics to the readership of Newsweek magazine and also to the viewers of PBS through his multi-part series "Free to Choose". In that same year of 1967 as a freshman student in "Honors Economics" I read Friedman's most famous book, Capitalism and Freedom, and in it found some of the principles that I hold dear to this day.  These two experiences with blue-collar intellectuals belie somewhat Flynn's claim that these writers were all completely excluded from the realms of the cognoscenti, but they do not deflate his claim that they all had a special ability to communicate with the common man.
Also included in the book are sections on Will Durant, who went from anarchist speaker to become a popularizer of history both of philosophy and civilization, and while I have not read the eleven volumes of Will & Ariel Durants' History of Civilization from cover to cover, I have dipped in to sections of the books from time to time. Finally, he tells the story of Mortimer Adler who founded the "Great Books" movement and wrote many books explaining the ideas in those books. I, too, was inspired by the lure of great books and have spent more than twenty years of my adult life reading them in the Basic Program of Liberal Education at the University of Chicago. These form the foundation for my reading and my participation in the search (see The Moviegoer by Walker Percy).
In his book Daniel Flynn is able to clearly and succinctly elucidate the inspirational achievements of these blue collar intellectuals and how they shaped an era in which popular culture included a significant place for serious ideas. One of the most important lessons imparted by the lives of these intellectuals is how they inspired readers like myself to continue to read and learn and love the search for ideas in books.

Blue Collar Intellectuals by Daniel J. Flynn. ISI Books, 2011

Reading Steinbeck

Change: From Order to Chaos

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.” 
― Herman Melville


The scene is changing as we read the opening paragraph of The Grapes of Wrath that begins with the famous line, "To the red country and part of the gray country", and ends with "as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country."

Thus we have at the beginning of the novel becoming -- change in nature witnessed through the landscape of Oklahoma. That signals one of the major themes of the novel. The change is not limited to nature, for the first man who is named, Tom Joad, is also undergoing change. His transition is one from prison to freedom, the freedom of the road and the freedom of parole. But his change also signals another aspect of change. Just as he is moving from the rigid boundaries and rules of prison to the open road and his family the world of the novel and his family, the Joads, is moving from order to chaos. This is not a sudden movement, rather one signaled in steps through incidents and events throughout the novel. Once they arrive in California they descend from the seeming luxury (in their experience) of the "government camp" to the dreary life in the "boxcars". The ultimate chaos, beyond which some will survive, just as a few did with Noah in the Bible, will be the flood at the end of the novel. In between we see the family change and survive severe trials that test their ability to deal with the changes they face.

Within the family the leader is, in many ways, Ma Joad. It is she who demonstrates strength, determination, and, above all, integrity, but as she journeys at the head of the family she also changes. Her change can be seen in her gradual recognition of the importance of the larger community beyond her family as she feeds the children around the family's cook fire (p 253) and, more dramatically in the final chapter of the novel (p 445):

"Ever'body's in the same wagon. S'pose we was down. You'd gove us a han'."
"Yes," Ma said, "we would."
"Or anybody."
"Or anybody." Use' ta be the fambly was fust. It ain't so now. It's anybody. Worse off we get, the more we got to do."

Thus we see in the change of Ma Joad and her family perhaps a reaction to the changing of their world with the gradual descent into chaos. A greater need for community with the scarcity of resources for coping with life -- for living itself. The changes of the family seem also to lead to a purpose in life perhaps suggested by the strange yet noble action of Rose of Sharon at the end of the novel. It reminds me of the words of Erich Hoffer:

We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence, but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for. (Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition, p 88)

For out of the chaos of their world the Joads may yet have found something for which to live.


The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Penguin Books, New York. 2002 (1939).
Reflections on the Human Condition by Eric Hoffer. Harper & Row, New York. 1973.