A book I’d like to read

 I wish someone would publish Eric Hoffer’s notebooks.

Hoffer’s biographer, Tom Bethell, says there are 131 of them at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Bethel gave several examples of the kinds of notes Hoffer made in an article published in Harper’s in 2005. This one, written in 1951, seems like description of a lot of people I met in Texas politics who had a party affiliation, rather than an identity:

 

The Incomplete Individual

It is fearfully simple: The incomplete individual cannot stand on his own, cannot make sense of himself. He is a part and not a self-sufficient whole. He can make sense, have a purpose, and seem useful when he becomes a part of a functioning whole.

 

I’m less interested in Hoffer’s politics than in the way he worked as a writer.

He did research at the public library. He’d make notes and copy passages that interested him. He’d then work through the notes, making connections with other ideas in other notebooks, recasting ideas until they were clear, discarding the old notes as newer, better ideas emerged in clearer, briefer language.

Hoffer owned few books and few other possessions. Lili Osborne, who was close to him, said that when Hoffer died it took about an hour to clean out his room.

It seems like a good way to work to me.

• Source: Tom Bethell, “Eric Hoffer and the art of the notebook”; Harper’s Magazine, July 1, 2005.