Whats the deal with Baruch de Spinoza?
I read Spinoza when I was at Yale drama school, and I don’t actually remember why. It was probably because it was Spinoza and he was supposed to be important. Maybe I was just avoiding my schoolwork. That’s a pretty heavy procrastination tool. I know. I must have been pretty desperate! I think that what grabbed me was there is a paragraph in one of his works which he talks about how he set out to find continuous supreme and everlasting happiness. Then a couple years ago, I read that Einstein, in his old age, was asked if he believed in God and he said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God.” So I picked up this book called The Courtier and the Heretic, and I thought, My God, this is an amazing story. Sort of a Greek tragedy, the story of a young man whose community has to shut him out in order to survive in Amsterdam. I took a huge number of notes, and I couldn’t let go of it, so I just sat down and wrote the play quite quickly, probably within a week or ten days. What do you think about the cas
