Before the Sabbath
Hoffer, Eric
BEFORE THE SABBATH Eric Hoffer Harper & Row / $7.95 William Gavin Eric Hoffer has been overpraised and undervalued, ignored and lionized for the wrong reasons, admired for intellectual virtues he...
...In seven simple declarative sentences he says more (and says it more eloquently) about the mystery of death and the bewilderment of human beings in the face of tragedy than other writers could say in a book...
...I will resist the temptation to quote Hoffer in the hope that readers of this review will buy the book and see for themselves that age has not withered the mind of this great man...
...No matter what subject he chooses to examine, he is always doing the same thing: reminding us that with discipline and hard work a thoughtful man can think and write in a way that is as free of cant as it is of illusion...
...He has founded no school and has no disciples...
...Without a doubt, Hoffer is regarded, by critics as well as admirers, as an unusual man-the longshoreman who writes like a professor, not your ordinary professor, but the kind of professor you wish all professors were like even though none of them are...
...It is the intelligent, deliberate organization of sounds, and it exists for its own sake...
...Before the Sabbath is about Eric Hoffer, thinking...
...At times his opinions seem to be those of the village crank...
...He has no ideology...
...I do want to point out, however, that on page 138 of Before the Sabbath, Hoffer performs a small miracle of writing...
...No one else says that, perhaps because no one else really believes it anymore...
...BEFORE THE SABBATH Eric Hoffer Harper & Row / $7.95 William Gavin Eric Hoffer has been overpraised and undervalued, ignored and lionized for the wrong reasons, admired for intellectual virtues he does not have and damned for positions he has never held...
...Programmatic music is about something (a storm, the sea) and the music tries to portray in sound the essence of that something...
...Indeed it is not at all clear that he is a thinker in any conventional sense...
...Reading Hoffer, I am reminded of the distinction between programmatic and pure music...
...Of all the American thinkers of our time, Hoffer alone plays pure music...
...He is not immune to the intellectual eccentricities of the self-taught, solitary thinker...
...But Hoffer does, and this is the source of his strength as a writer and thinker...
...He comments upon current events but only in the sense that such events stimulate his mind and lead him to what he calls, in a delightfully mixed metaphor, "a totally new train of thought to chew on...
...In the Hoffer tradition, Before the Sabbath is not "about" the 1960s or old age or the decline of Great Britain or pre-World War One Europe or Shaka the Zulu chief or work or Lenin ("a plague-infested rat") or the ancient Hebrews ("the first Occidentals"), although these and other topics fill the book's pages...
...If anyone cares about the human spirit a hundred years from now, those seven sentences and the sad, noble music they make will be remembered...
...Pure music, on the other hand, is not about anything...
...He is not a member of any intellectual cult...
...Yet there is more to Hoffer's singularity than this...
...He has shown no development as a thinker since the publication of his first book almost 30 years ago...
Vol. 12 • July 1979 • No. 7
