July 25 is marked on my calendar. Eric Hoffer claimed it was his birthday. But almost everything he said about his own life was a myth or teaching story, rather than literal truth. He said:
We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.
Hoffer helped me understand what a life that included some thinking and writing could be. Although I know him only through his writing, he was one of my teachers.
If you’d like a sense of his voice, here’s a sample:
It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations — past and present — are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual’s hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia. Thus, we are up against the paradox that the individual who is more complex, unpredictable, and mysterious than any communal entity is the one nearest to our understanding; so near that even the interval of millennia cannot weaken our feeling of kinship. If in some manner the voice of the individual reaches us from the remotest distance of time, it is a timeless voice speaking about ourselves.
• Source: Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition; New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, pp. 96 and 97.
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