Hoffer and Hoffman

Other than their similar-sounding Saxon surnames, Eric Hoffer and Daniel Hoffman would appear to have little in common. Hoffer was an autodidactic longshoreman. He never went to college and wrote cranky, hard-to-categorize books, some about the personal, pathogenic origins of mass movements. Hoffman is a poet, literary scholar and teacher, and by all accounts an urbane man of letters. By some impossible-to-foresee confluence of attention, I have been reading and enjoying both. Here are samples of the work of each man. Juxtaposed, their kinships and differences grow vivid. This is aphorism No. 206 from Hoffer’s The Passionate State of Mind:

“Death would have no terror were it to come a month from now, a week or even a day – but not tomorrow. For death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.”

And here, from Beyond Silence: Selected Shorter Poems – 1948-2003, is Hoffman’s “Thought I Was Dying”:

“Like a bucket
With a hole

“I couldn’t find
Just felt the seeping

“Of my life
As it was leaving

“My wife my children
Drifting away

“My head empty
My hands my heart

“Drained and void
The bed cold

“I thought it’s hard
To leave my life

“With each breath
A little less

“In the veins whistling
Till the sun shone black

“As though I never
Could come back”

I would only add that in the Hoffman poem I cited two days ago, he refers to his Buddhist-sounding “empty mind” and to an “Empty-headed” chestnut tree. In this poem, he writes of “My head empty.” An odd phrase for so plainly erudite a man. Any takers, thesis-mongers?