'To Notice, to Wonder, to Marvel, to Be Astonished'

In his Notebooks, 1922-86, Michael Oakeshott titles an entry from March 1955 “The True Believer”: 

“Before he became a member of the Party he felt himself to be merely an isolated individual, lonely & lost, tormented, helpless, vindictive, but quite incapable of forming judgments either about himself or about the affairs of the world. He held no standard of values; he felt himself to be a pariah. All he knew for certain was that he was not a man at peace with himself & and could not be at peace with other men. He sought an authority to obey; in the party he found release.”

 

Oakeshott sounds remarkably like the American “longshoreman philosopher” Eric Hoffer (1902-83). 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 and pasted them in a scrapbook, then moved on to Hoffer’s books, in particular his first, The True Believer (1951). Compare Oakeshott’s observation with a passage (Sec. 2, Chap. 10) from that book:

 

“A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.

This minding of other people’s business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national, and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor’s shoulder or fly at his throat.”

 

The busybody, in other words, is a sad soul, empty and likely without mature values. He dwells in a state of eternal childhood: If you don’t like Daddy, find a new Daddy, one who will hold your hand and lead you down the path to righteousness. The type brings to mind conversion to the more rabid forms of religious practice.

 

What moved me about Hoffer’s work, and what still moves me, were his commonsensical ideas, his lack of pretentiousness and snobbery, the clarity of his prose, his gift for aphorism, his hatred of Communism and other tyrannies, his support for Israel and his working-class origins. Not that I could have identified many of those qualities when I was fifteen. Apart from my teachers and doctors, I knew no one who had gone to college. I grew up knowing that autodidacticism was the essence of true education. Degrees still mean little to me. Hoffer seemed like a guy I could talk to. Oakeshott returns to these themes and their alternatives throughout his Notebooks:

 

“A man incapable of being happily resigned to being a nobody is never likely to be a somebody.”

 

“To notice, to wonder, to marvel, to be astonished, perhaps to be dismayed—la chase--& then what? To understand that one never completely understands.”

 

“Some people take everything for granted; to others, everything is wonderful and mysterious. What else is there to do with the mystery of human life but to fall in love with it!”