What grandeur, what vividness and freshness of perception! A primitive mentality, naive, clumsy, yet bold and all-embracing, throbbing with an eager curiosity, sparked an imagination which had the directness, precision, and penetration of a grand scientific conception. What a passion for symmetry and order! Without the equipment of knowledge or tools, a bold mind sets itself to subdue the chaos of the multitude of natural phenomena, to correlate, intertwine, and arrange them into a pattern.
Part of Eric Hoffer’s appeal as an essayist was his serenity, amounting at times to simplicity and mirrored by a prose style verging in places on simple-mindedness. His was not, however, the home-and-hearth serenity of C. S. Lewis or Christopher Morley. For at least the first half of his long life Hoffer lived in thrall to a vagabond restiveness that, while it rewarded him with a range of experience much wider than most social critics possess, also denied him the ties that bind men to an appreciation of normative existence.
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