From Laura Miller’s “Everybody loves Spinoza” (Salon: 17 May 2006):
Goldstein’s description [of Spinoza’s conception of God] reminds me of a passage in Neal Stephenson’s historical novel Quicksilver, in which a fictional character has an intimation about a friend, a real genius and contemporary of Spinoza’s: “[He] experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears.”