THERE is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive. Passions usually have their roots in that which is blemished, crippled, incomplete and insecure within us. The passionate attitude is less a response to stimuli from without than an emanation of an inner dissatisfaction.
BY OTHERS◎Saturday, January 1, 1955
by Eric Hoffer
537 numbered aphorisms from the longshoreman philosopher. Eric Hoffer worked twenty-four years on the San Francisco docks and wrote in spare notebooks. The Passionate State of Mind (1955) and Reflections on the Human Condition (1973) - every line is a finished thing.
tags: aphorism, longshoreman, true-believer, san-francisco, passion, change, self-knowledge
NAMEHOFFER, ERIC
BORN25 July 1898 · The Bronx, New York
DIED21 May 1983 · San Francisco
UNIONILWU · LOCAL 10 · S.F. WATERFRONT
YEARS ON THE PIER1943 – 1967 · 24 yrs · Pier 91 et al.
SCHOOLINGnone, after age seven · self-taught in libraries
CITATIONPresidential Medal of Freedom · 1983
PRINCIPAL TITLES
The True Believer · 1951The Passionate State of Mind · 1955The Ordeal of Change · 1963Reflections on the Human Condition · 1973
“A man’s worth depends not on what he knows but on what he wants to know.”- notebook entry, 1958
CARD VALID THROUGH WORKING LIFE · NOT TRANSFERABLE · ONE BODY · ONE NAME
A NOTEBOOK · KEPT IN SQUARE INK
588 aphorisms · drawn from eleven books · arrow-keys to turn pages
FIND /
Eric Hoffer was born in the Bronx in 1898. His mother died when he was seven; he went blind from grief shortly after; his sight returned at fifteen, by which point he had assumed he would be illiterate forever and was making up for lost time. He did manual labour for the next forty years - orange-picking in California, gold-mining in the Sierras, finally twenty-four years on the San Francisco waterfront with the ILWU.
He wrote in pocket notebooks during shift breaks. The True Believer (1951) was written almost entirely on the docks; The Passionate State of Mind (1955) collects the aphorisms he had been keeping for fifteen years. He did not retire from the longshore until 1967. He never owned a car, never used a typewriter without strain, never gave a public lecture without complaint.
The voice is unmistakable: low to the ground, suspicious of intellectuals, sympathetic to the manual worker, willing to speak about the most uncomfortable subjects (mass movements, fanaticism, self-hatred, the will to nothingness) in plain American sentences that give the reader nowhere to hide.
On the form
The aphorism, in Hoffer's hands, is not a fragment of a longer thought he didn’t finish - it is the whole thought, finished, set down in the smallest space it could reach. The numbered structure of The Passionate State of Mind is his admission that none of these sentences need each other: any one of them, taken alone and held, will do its work.
He wrote because the work on the pier was steady and physical, not in spite of it. The eight-hour shift was a shield against intellectual life; the notebook was the discipline of attending to it without quitting either.
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