In later years it’s harder to form friendships, for various reasons:

·      One already cherishes more friends than one can keep up with

·      Post-career, -kids, -ambition, one grasps less

·      Younger people are more alluring than oldsters

·      We’re wearier than we were

·      … and why bother, so near the finish line?

We’ve graduated from irresistible early love; been there, done that, if we’re lucky; watched faith abrade; discovered with Shakespeare how “quick bright things come to confusion.” The serenity of “the sere (and) yellow leaf” needn’t be sad; sweet relief after the tortuous avidity of youth; quieter, more cautious. Few embraces prove as giddying as we dreamed or as bruising as we feared. Life goes on.

What a surprise, then, in my eighth decade, to observe myself sliding into love – not with a breathing acquaintance, but with one more alive, complex, quivering than most we encounter; with time for me, to listen, prod, converse with; whom behind his published utterances an incompletion can be detected, which invites me in.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) has waited on my shelf for more than fifty years, beside Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, and other brainy dudes my pride felt I should know but my eyelids closed on like stubborn jaws. I’ve no patience for impenetrable prose, however meaty its matter. The first goal of speech, I insist, is to ingratiate, and if it can’t get past that hurdle, to hell with it. I particularly recoil from philosophers whose systems presume to explain existence; when they present their proofs as conclusive – if a, therefore b, therefore c, et cetera – my hair takes fire – with fury – and frustration I don’t get them better. Why aren’t I smarter! I cudgel my brains (metaphorically), in weepy envy. Please, please, let me be enrolled in the brainiac’s division.

Spinoza rebuffed me. His signal work, The Ethics, honored by souls I honored, resisted my attempts to storm its castellated syntax. Neither did I grasp where Spinoza stood in the history of thought, why he mattered. Some thinkers one can place even if one can’t fathom: Socrates, Aristotle, Locke, Marx, say, I can snug into my idea of evolution like jigsaw puzzle pieces just so. Spinoza founded no school; antithetic followers claim him as forefather (Marx, Freud, Einstein, Santayana, and Nazis, for starters). I gave up, sorry, life was too short, committing Spinoza to my boundless ocean of ignorance. Bye, Baruch. Then that ministering angel, the Internet, came to my rescue. The Internet knows everything about everything and can tell you as much – or as little – as you choose to know. For scatterbrains like your correspondent a priceless prosthesis: Spinoza – or any subject – for dummies!

I began with Wiki and other handy summarizers to get the gist – in newsroom terms, the headline. Next stop, the quotation compilers, who shrink complex concepts into palatable pellets, algorithmically arrayed by frequency of citation. I collected a bunch of quotes into a trim bouquet, which I’ll share with you when I’ve finishing snipping. Then a friend of a friend wrote a slender amiable book on the man, not quite for dummies but neither for masochists.

Spinoza’s pals called him Bento. Our bromance commenced.

 This is the first of a series of – who knows how many. I’m hoping for all our sakes not too many.