Another interesting excerpt from a book I have read/am reading/or saw as I was browsing that was meaningful to me. I suppose one is obliged to say that because I reprint something here doesn't necessarily imply agreement, endorsement, ideological solidarity with the author, etc. 

This passage is the first paragraph of Robert Nozick's 1981 book, "Philosophical Explanations," published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Including the index, the book is 764 pages long. I have not read it, nor do I ever intend to. The back cover boasts that Nozik's book "has been hailed by the critics as a notable intellectual event ...."

I, too, seek the unreadable book: urgent thoughts to grapple with in agitation and excitement, revelations to be transformed by or to transform, a book incapable of being read straight through, a book, even, to bring reading to a stop. I have not found that book, or attempted it. Still, I wrote and thought in awareness of it, in the hope that this book would bask in its light. That hope would be arrogant if it weren't self-fulfilling -- to face the light, even from great distance, is to be warmed. Is it sufficient, though, when light is absent, to face in the direction it would emanate from?

Over the Christmas holiday I took a break from "deep" reading to settle down with some purely escapist fare, Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction epic "2312." It was published in 2012 and clocks in at 657 pages. Even so, it reads faster than "Clarissa." But anyway ...

I got into it quickly, and was soon highlighting segments and jotting notes in the margins, an activity that years ago I would have regarded as the worst kind of vandalism. Today, I regard marginalia as a thing of beauty and have no problem embellishing my books, both fiction and non-fiction, with scribbles, arrows, underlines, etc.

Anyway. Robinson's book chronicles life in the year 2312, teasing the reader both with flashbacks (in the form of excerpts from a history text) and a mounting narrative the mystery of some transformative event occurring that year that changes the course of human history. It is told from the point of view of Swan, who is an amalgamation of the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic and the British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. 

I toyed with the idea of writing a full-length review. The book, in my opinion, is a twisted mess of infatuation with technology and confused thinking about history, economics and social life. Indeed, one of Robinson's own sentences describes what I believe is one of the book's main problems: "By the early twenty-fourth century, there was too much going on to be either seen or understood." 

I'm going to bail out of this one. I don't have time to wade through the book again, which I'd really want to do before attempting a serious analysis of the bewildering ideological problems that undermine the narrative. Also, I'd want to look at some of Robinson's other books, particularly his award-winning Mars trilogy, where I gather that the issues of economic and social issues are more clearly worked out. A book ought to stand on its own, obviously, but I concede that it's possible that "2312" might make more sense if placed in that context. Because on Robinson's Mars, apparently, capitalism doesn't exist. 

Suffice to say, Earth in "2312" is still run under winner-take-all capitalism, and there is virtually no ice anywhere. Those who have left either live on other planets or their moons, or aboard hollowed-out asteroids that have been transformed through geo-engineering to satisfy every possible whim. These asteroids are known as the terraria.

Robinson is an intelligent writer. He clearly grasps the hard sciences, and that's where the text spends most of its time -- detailed descriptions of the processes used to transform a hunk of rock hurtling through space into a paradise, for example. Or, in what I thought was the most intriguing part, descriptions of how people are able to live on Mercury without being fried to a crisp. Ecology is, apparently, always a component of Robinson's sci-fi. That's to his credit. 

It is this essential strain of "2312" that prompts today's post. I'm including below two excerpts from Robinson's book that contain a good deal of insight into the predicament in which humanity now finds itself: an ecological crisis prompting a startling comment by another novelist, Barbara Kingsolver, in the latest issue of The Sun magazine: "I don't actually feel sure humanity will be around in fifty or sixty years."

Back to Robinson. The first excerpt is from the chapter entitled "Swan in Africa," on page 443 of the paperback edition:

Earth the bad planet. Despite its wind and sky, she was coming to hate it again, and not just because of the awful (gravity), but rather because of the evidence everywhere of what her species had done to the place, and was still doing. The dead hand of the past, so huge, so heavy. The air seemed a syrup she had to struggle through. On in the terraria one lived free, like an animal -- one could be an animal, make one's own life one way or another. Live as naked as you wanted. On the God-damned Earth the accumulated  traditions and laws and habits made something that was worse than any body bra; it was one's mind that was held in place, tied in straitjackets, obliged to be like all the others in their ridiculous boxed habits. Here they were, on the only planetary surface on which you could walk freely, naked to the wind and the sun, and when they had a choice, they sat in boxes and stared at littler boxes, just as if they had no choice -- as if they were in a space station -- as if the bad old days of the caged centuries had never gone away. They didn't even look at the stars at night.

That's a hell of a paragraph. Sitting in boxes, staring at littler boxes. 

Okay, so here's the next one. It's from the chapter entitled "Swan and Zasha," and it appears on page 100. Again, Swan (who spends most of her time in Mercury) is here visting Earth:

Through gaps in the cloud layer she should see the light-but-dark blue of the Terran sky, subtle and full. It looked like a blue dome flattened at the center, perhaps a few kilometers above the clouds -- she reached up for it -- although knowing too that it was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything. The blue itself was complex, narrow in range but infinite within that range. It was an intoxicating sight, and you could breathe it -- one was always breathing it, you had to. The wind shoved it into you! Breathe and get drunk, oh my, to be free of all restraint, minimally clothed, lying on the bare surface of a planet, sucking its atmosphere as if it were an aqua vitae, feeling in your chest how it kept you alive! No Terran she had ever met properly appreciated their air, or saw their sky for what it was. In fact, they very seldom looked at it.

No, we don't look at it. Or anything beneath it, for that matter. Not really. Sitting in boxes, staring at littler boxes. Oblivious to the destruction of the only planet (that we know about) where it is possible for human beings to live.

A fellow thespian and film buff called me Sunday afternoon. "Hey, one of our favorite actors just died." Like all middle-aged movie fans, I've known that one day we'll be seeing a flood of tributes to one of our titan thespians, the ones getting on in years -- Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, etc. When I asked who, I was stunned to learn that it was arguably the greatest actor of my own generation -- Philip Seymour Hoffman, found with a syringe hanging out of his arm like some grotesque scene from a William Burroughs novel.

I felt a certain kinship with Hoffman. Acting is what I might have pursued (as a profession) if I hadn't been more interested in journalism. The theater remains important to me, and the stage is a place I've revisited countless times over the years in amateur productions, some really fun stuff. What I liked about Hoffman was that he was, physically, a little like me. Same age, deep voice, sort of stocky, with a paunch, and average looking, not Hollywood handsome. Not Brad Pitt, in other words. I always took a certain amount of pride in the fact that someone like that could do what he did. Of course, I could never do what he did. As an actor and artist, he was lightning in a bottle. He was my generation's Brando. He was the best, period.

And now he's gone, and that is profoundly sad. 

One never would have thought, looking at him stuffed into those cheap, too-small T-shirts he wore as Scotty J., the porn film crewman in "Boogie Nights," that the same person would go on to win an Oscar playing Truman Capote, or that he would make a ferocious villain in a "Mission Impossible" film, or that he could pull off the cult leader Lancaster Dodd in "The Master." Or the fast-talking CIA analyst in "Charlie Wilson's War." Or the compassionate nurse in "Magnolia." Or anybody. He could play anybody. He was a tall man, but I swear in "Capote" he actually made himself look small. Not to mention what he did with his voice. 

Hoffman always made it work. You always believed him. Even if the film was crap -- and he made so many of them, some inevitably were -- he was always amazing. He could carry a film, or show up halfway through and dazzle you with one or two scenes. But the thing is, you believed in the character. He wasn't a chameleon like DeNiro was in his prime, gaining or losing an insane amount of weight. He couldn't slip past you, unrecognized, like some actors can, because he really couldn't ever get away with not looking like Philip Seymour Hoffman. His look was too ... big. Too distinctive. You always knew it was him, and yet -- he was always different. And even if he was playing someone from the "fringes" of life, he never did caricature. His characters were always deeply, profoundly human. Complex. Contradictory.

I'll bet there are legions of movie fans who saw and loved him in one thing or another who don't even know that he was also an accomplished stage actor. That's where the bug bit him: His mom took him to see a play. The variety of his choices for the stage was just as impressive as for the screen. As all actors should, Hoffman did Shakespeare. He played Iago. Having done some Shakespeare and being intimately familiar with many of the plays, I'll say that Hoffman isn't the first actor who comes to mind when I think of Iago. But on the other hand, I have no doubt that he knocked it out of the park. Because he always did. That's what he did. The list goes on. He did Chekhov. O'Neill. Arthur Miller. Sam Shepherd. Was there anything he couldn't do? I don't think so. 

I'm glad he made so many films, because there are quite a few I haven't seen yet. I have yet to see him and Ethan Hawke in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead." So I have that, and others, to look forward to. 

But we'll never see his Lear. Or Prospero. Or Hickey. He's the only actor I can think of who would have made four hours of "The Iceman Cometh" not simply tolerable, but thrilling. Hoffman wasn't yet old, but he was a titan. The loss of such a talented and serious artist in his prime is a genuine tragedy.