'I Have Escaped a Lot of Grief'

I credit Eric Hoffer with moving me to become, after a protracted wayward delay, a newspaper reporter. His “Reflections” column was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped them and pasted them in a scrapbook, then moved on to Hoffer’s books, in particular his first, The True Believer. What moved me, and still move me, were Hoffer’s commonsensical ideas, his lack of pretentiousness and snobbery, the clarity of his prose, his gift for aphorism, his hatred of Communism and other tyrannies, and his working-class origins. Not that I could have identified any of those qualities when I was sixteen. Apart from my teachers, I knew no one who had gone to college. Degrees still mean nothing to me. Hoffer seemed like a guy I could talk to. He was a longshoreman. My father was an ironworker, my mother a tax clerk. Hoffer never intimidated me. He was my model autodidact and I envied his independence. In his biography, Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher (2013), Tom Bethell quotes his man as saying:  

“I have escaped a lot of grief by not being able to take myself seriously. It has never occurred to me that I had to have a philosophy; that I was face to face with ‘the silence of the universe,’ that I had a duty to defend or denounce, etc. What I wanted was to think things through, to know the reason of things. I loathed Hitler and Stalin and Lenin and raged at the brazen hypocrisies of Communism.”

People who take themselves seriously, who think their wishes are important, end up causing most of the problems in the world. I’m reminded of that character in T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party -- a psychiatrist, of all things -- who says:

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

This dovetails nicely with another Hoffer observation reported by Bethell: “A deadly seriousness emanates from all other forms of life. The yell of pain and of fear man has in common with the beasts, but he alone smiles and laughs.”

Hoffer was born on this date, July 25, in 1898, and died May 21, 1983.