Touching post about Spinoza here. I tried to read Spinoza when I was 13 after watching a very weird puppet show about him very late at night on TV — back when if you watched TV in the middle of the night in the UK you could watch all the Open University broadcasts on BBC 2 (an awkward lecturer talking you through a chemistry experiment or medieval history at 2am) and/or the most obscure arty stuff on Channel 4. Anyway, this puppet show (sounds incredible but I’m sure that’s right) was about the life of Spinoza, whom I had certainly never heard of before, and ended with a slow scroll of a good translation of the Borges poem about him, which has the line “Someone is constructing God in the twilight” (poem here: babelmatrix.org/works/e…). (Of course I’d never heard of Borges either.) I proceeded immediately the next day to the library. Of course I totally failed to read Spinoza in any meaningful way at that point but I have never forgotten. I try to remember this sort of thing now that my eldest is 13.