His anger about the modern world, about capitalism, about environmental damage, seemed back then to put him on the political left. The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet are, in fact, full of straw men, and as much as Hoff hopes to lighten the atmosphere with Winnie-the-Pooh quotes, he comes off as cranky and aggrieved in ways that have become far more familiar in the last couple of decades. And then along came a book telling me that the scholars were actually full of it, and that lying stoned on the floor was perhaps the profounder wisdom. The workloads were daunting, the reading difficult.
Going from a mediocre California high school to Columbia University, I was faced with the reality that I was not so smart or special as I had thought, and that there were a great many people who knew a great deal more than me about a great many things. College was, for me, pretty overwhelming. Rereading him now, I’m embarrassed that I ever took him seriously, though I can see what must have been appealing.
So I took a class on Eastern religion and read the Tao Te Ching, and I went to a couple of meetings of a campus group of Korean Taoists who all wore suits and ties and instructed me to chant until I could raise water from a bowl placed in front of me, but mostly I read Benjamin Hoff like everyone else. In college, I had a minor romantic entanglement with a hippie who changed my life by giving me a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, putting me on a Green Tortoise bus (she was eager to get me the hell out of Eugene, Oregon, where I was moping about because she had a new boyfriend when I came to visit), and telling me to look into Taoism. Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh (1982) and The Te of Piglet (1992)
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