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. 

Tonight's post represents the launch of what I intend to be a regular, ongoing "series," if you will, on this blog. It is entitled "Excerpts," and entries will comprise (you don't often see this word used correctly, but it is here) exactly that: Passages from books I have read or am reading (or saw as I was browsing) that were meaningful to me. 

I suppose I'm obliged to say that just because I reprint it here doesn't necessarily imply agreement, endorsement, etc. 

This passage below is the final paragraph of historian John Brewer's 1997 book, "Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century," published by Farrar Straus Giroux. I have taken the liberty of putting one word in italics for emphasis:

In visiting country houses, watching films of Georgian novels and admiring the works of an earlier age in museums, we often engage in a nostalgic reverie (one of the pleasures of our own imaginations) , dwelling on what we believe we have lost as a result of our modern condition. This is perhaps an inevitable consequence  of our sense that twentieth century society and culture are radically different from their predecessors, which leads us to emphasize the order, stability and decorum of eighteenth-century England. But, as I have tried to show, contemporaries saw their culture as modern, not traditional, an indication that their society and way of life was changing. It was its dynamism, variety and exuberance -- not its respectability or elegance -- which intoxicated them.

At least once a week, I take our 4-year-old son to spend the day with my parents. We have breakfast there, play, usually do an outing to the library, a park or museum in the morning, lunch, read stories, etc. He loves going there.

Down in the basement are all of my childhood books. He’s expressed little interest in the thin, worn Scholastic paperbacks that stuff several shelves. Rather, he’s drawn to a shelf that contains our old Readers’ Digest Condensed Books series – 12 hardback volumes of Serious Literature. He likes to take one or two out, stack them on the ping pong table nearby, perhaps look at the (very few) pictures, and replace them.

Last week he started obsessing over one of them. “I want to bring this one home,” he kept repeating. “Can I take this one home?”

“Why do you want to take this one home?”

“Because I like it.”

My answer is always some variation of “No.” Someday, after all, we will bring those here.” Not that there’s any room for a 12-volume set. But last week, he wore me down. And an idea occurred to me:

“Silas, I will take this book home with us on one condition,” I said. “You must agree to let me read you one page to you every day.”

“Okay.”

I glanced at the spine, which displays the four titles contained inside. The options were not good. “Kidnapped”? For a 4-year-old? No. “Messer Marco Polo”? “Pride and Prejudice”? I don’t think so. My best bet, I thought, might be “Wind, Sand and Stars,” the 1939 memoir by French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

“Let’s go down and find one with a story you might like.”

I scanned the shelf, and my eyes finally came to rest on what seemed a good candidate: Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.”  

I say “seemed.” Certainly more appealing than “Pride and Prejudice.” It is a children’s story, after all. But it’s also a disorienting one. My first encounter with it was not the book, but the Disney film: It was the first movie I saw in a theater. My mom took me, and I think she was more freaked out than I was. I don’t think he’d be ready for the film, given his viewing tastes, but the book might work for him. So we brought it home.

That first night, I actually read about two pages. I couldn’t very well leave Alice in the middle of her long flight to the center of the earth, so I pressed on so Silas could see that she did indeed have a safe landing.

The next day I queried him about the story thus far. He remembered the important points, and early in the afternoon, he asked me to keep reading.

I finished the first chapter.

He wanted me to keep reading.

I read the second chapter.

He wanted me to keep reading.

This is not what I expected, and even though (unlike Alice herself) he was open to a book with very few pictures, I found myself squirming. I’m not sure what, exactly, was eating at me. Lots of children’s books are surreal and weird, especially those with pictures. This is a kid who was demanding multiple readings of “Green Eggs and Ham” when he was two. But 30 pages of weirdness is one thing. A hundred?

I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Alice’s digressions made it difficult for me to find a rhythm and tempo. This may sound odd coming from someone who is comfortably approaching the 1,100th page of Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa, or: A History of a Young Lady,” but I think it was not so much a matter of the text defeating him as it defeated me. I didn’t know how to read it. And with so few illustrations, there was nothing there for him to linger over.

So yesterday, we returned to the shelf in my parents’ basement. The volume with Alice went back, and I scanned the titles again. Kipling’s “Jungle Books”? No, not quite yet. I don’t want him to grow up terrified of snakes. I finally settled on “Rabbit Hill,” which I’d never heard about, but learned was also a children’s story. I explained to Silas that if he really wanted to press on with Alice, I had my own copy of the unabridged version at home.

Last night, we began reading. Knocked off three pages, although he would have sat for more. Stay tuned.

In the midst of a writing project that already requires an insane amount of reading, I now find myself facing the awesome task of researching homeschooling. I didn’t plan on this, but almost overnight, I’m up to my eyeballs in it.

Although our son is only 4 and a half and won’t begin kindergarten for a year, it feels like I’m late to this game. That’s probably because the essay that lit my fire was written by a mom I know who indicated that she and her husband knew before their first child was born that they would home-school. Now, I’m thinking that we need to have our act together by May 2014 – the month our school district has sign-ups for kindergarten the following fall.

Oregon doesn’t mandate kindergarten, but we do feel that our son should be involved in some brand of formal “schooling” in a year, since he’s done so well in preschool, which he loves. So if he does not head to kindergarten in 2014, we should be connected with some community infrastructure in order to ensure his continued intellectual and social development. I know little about home schooling, but I do know that it doesn’t occur in the isolation of a single household, presided over exclusively by the parents -- a fate I would not wish upon anyone. Indeed, one of our goals is to afford him an opportunity to engage more fully with the world.

Part of the motivation stems from the former. What started as an effort to sharply limit his television time has offered a window into how his mind works. It’s not like he was watching a lot to start with (I kept it, more or less, at two hours or less daily) but now, with a lot of effort, I got him down to 60-90 minutes per week. Days will go by without him even asking to watch television.  The result -- besides leaving me even more wiped out at the end of the day -- is that his reading time has dramatically expanded. That’s his initiative. His choice. And it’s now clear that this has had an immediate impact: After meticulously tracking his reading activity and observing his behavior for the last couple weeks, this is what I see: He is teaching himself to read.  

This is not something we’ve pushed. Certainly, as a writer, I live in a house that is full of books. My wife and I are both readers, books and newspapers. We don’t require him to read. We don’t use it as a lever for good behavior – i.e., “You can watch "Bob the Builder" for 30 minutes if you read this book with me.” Conversely, books are never taken away as punishment, which is not true of toys. All I do is ask, two or three times a day: “Shall we read a story”? If the answer is yes, a book (or two, or three or four or five) comes out, and my theater training pays off as my "stage voice" switches on. Let me tell you, reading "Horton Hears a Who" is a serious workout. To do it right takes about 17 minutes. I've had short monologues that were easier. 

If the answer is "no," which it sometimes is, I don’t press the issue. The choice to read is always allowed to be his choice.

Even so, he’s clearly into it. He wants to learn. And he is learning – and he’s doing it without me or anyone else trying to explain the bewildering phonics of the English language. I understand it well enough, but I don’t personally feel equipped to teach it in a responsible way.

So there’s that. Also, my wife and I agree that he is simply not going to benefit in a classroom that has a student-teacher ratio of 30-to-1 or higher. How could anyone?

For me, this is an extraordinarily complex issue. It’s a deeply personal decision, but it involves difficult political and historical questions that are bound up with a planetary ecological crisis and the crisis of capitalism, which is clearly exhausting itself. Even if one puts aside moral questions raised by a system that produces fabulous wealth for the few at the expense of the many, it is impossible to ignore what strikes me as the single most vexing contradiction: An economic system – participation in which the school system is ostensibly intended to prepare one for -- that requires endless growth to survive cannot continue on a planet with finite resources. It’s impossible by definition. This is not ideology. It’s math. It’s physics. It’s geography. It’s chemistry. It’s a reality we face – one that, in my view, responsible parents and teachers ought to prepare children for.

Because you don’t raise a child to exist in the world you grew up in, or to some extent, even the one they grow up in. You raise them to live, work and play in a world that doesn’t yet exist. Do our public schools do that? I am inclined to say that they don’t. I read the other day of a science textbook that gave a single, mealy-mouthed paragraph to global warming. It needs to be said:  In the present climate of social and political reaction, one can hardly blame public schools for their failings. It's not entirely their fault. This issue alone is wildly complex and it’s not one I intend to address here.

On the other hand, I also believe that we are obliged to defend public schools against the reactionary tsunami of for-profit (usually) privatization, standardized testing, budget cuts and attacks on teachers. And that’s on top of the insane nonsense the Christian right is always trying to crowbar into public school curricula.

It is in that context that we are considering, with increasing urgency, the question of whether to home-school our child. Because that is, after all, what we are essentially doing already. And as evidenced by our 4-year-old’s remarkable advances with language development and reading, it seems to be working so far. So we may continue to do it, or we may opt for public schools with (obviously) plenty of involvement and support on our parts.

But I have a lot of questions. 

In the final weeks of July, I became mildly obsessed with William Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline,” reading it several times and devouring opinions that have been written about it over the centuries. Those opinions faded quickly and vanished altogether when faced with “Cymbeline” in the flesh at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

One opinion of this infrequently performed play remains entrenched in my mind, however, and it’s worth repeating if only to provide a segue-way for a point I want to make. It Samuel Johnson, from his 1765 edition of the play, and it’s as over-the-top as it is wrong:

“To remark (on) the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection and too gross for aggravation.”

That’s crazy talk, unless we are to believe that Johnson found the events that transpire in the “system of life” that governs “The Comedy of Errors” and “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream” completely realistic. But I cite it because it’s a fair summation of much of the commentary on “Cymbeline,” which critics have seemed to think was somehow beneath Shakespeare – maybe he was bored, maybe the fire in his belly had snuffed out, etc. Why – this line of thinking goes – would the author of “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Othello” and “Macbeth” write … this?

If we can ask why the author of “King Lear” would have stooped to “Cymbeline,” then we might also ask why the director of “Schindler’s List” could possibly have directed a fourth Indiana Jones film, especially after the sublime perfection of having his hero literally ride off into the sunset in the third. Artists do what they do … and even if the English language’s greatest writer had produced only a “Hamlet” or a “Lear,” wouldn’t he have been entitled to write whatever he damn well pleased?

As for the utterly preposterous setup – the bet against Imogen’s virtue, the kidnapped sons reunited with their sister in a cave, unable (apparently) to discern that he is really a she, and the avalanche of revelations in the final act – one only need recall that Shakespeare did this sort of thing all the time. Even Lear brims with scenarios that don’t pass the straight-face test. If we’re going to be a stickler, then no: King Cymbeline probably would not forgive the exiled Belarius for kidnapping and raising to adulthood his two sons, no more than, say, Gloucester would believe that he’d actually survived leaping off the Dover Cliffs.

I digress, but the point is this: “Cymbeline” is regarded as “minor” Shakespeare. It’s generated relatively little comment over the centuries (while ruminations on “Hamlet” alone could stock several bookcases at a library). There’s been confusion over what kind of play it is, because it transcends genre – as much of Shakespeare does. It’s also a complicated play, with its multiple storylines, and thus difficult to follow. That said, I would add that my wife, who did not read the play before we saw it, understood it perfectly well.

Which brings me to OSF’s production, which runs through Oct. 11 in the outdoor Elizabethan Theater. Director Bill Rauch and his dramaturge teamed up for a clever edit of the first scene. In the script, the unnecessarily lengthy setup is provided by a “gentleman” to a visitor of the court. OSF wisely broke the section up, handing the lines to Anthony Heald, who spoke directly to the audience and gestured to the actors (briefly frozen in place) to make it all clear. It’s a brilliant move. Had they not done this, I suspect a lot of people would have been lost from the get-go.

I enjoyed reading the play, and I loved seeing it come alive on the outdoor stage under the stars. OSF imagines it with the visual language of a fairy tale. The queen (a wonderful Robin Goodrin-Nordril) who plots to kill Imogen’s husband Posthumus appears to have stepped out of the Brothers Grimm, going so far as to enclose the poison (or rather, what she believes is poison) inside a shiny red apple. Heald, as the court doctor, is amusing from beginning to end, drawing some of the biggest laughs of the evening.

Kenajuan Bentley is pitch-perfect as the scheming Italian Iachimo, a role that the BBC production from the 1980s took far too seriously. I confess to being a little underwhelmed by Dawn-Lyen Gardner as Imogen until she started pretending to be a man – only then does she become utterly charming. Actually, the entire supporting cast is stellar, which helps in a play in which the main characters – Cymbeline, Imogen and Posthumus – aren’t terribly interesting, on the page or the stage.

So no, “Cymbeline” isn’t one of Shakespeare’s best plays. But it’s a testament to his genius that even one of his “minor” plays can make for an evening of terrific theater in the right hands. OSF’s “Cymbeline” is wonderful and even achieves moments of transcendence, thanks to the occasional presence on stage of the play’s “ghosts” and Erica Sullivan’s remarkable performance as the Soothsayer. Ultimately, the production affirms a feeling I’ve had since seeing their amazing production of “Coriolanus” a few years ago: There is no “minor” Shakespeare. 

Suppose, for whatever reason, your project is to inoculate a young person to the pleasures and thrills of Shakespeare, this is how to do it: First, minimize their exposure to the Bard until they hit puberty, maybe a few years more. Then, declare that they’re in for a special treat and show them those BBC television productions of Shakespeare’s plays from the 1970s and early 1980s. Watch their eyes, and you’ll see something die a little inside.

The thing with that notoriously uneven series – they filmed literally every play – is that each production featured some of Britain’s finest Shakespearean actors, all elegantly costumed, and yet most are the quintessence of high-brow artistic tedium. Largely shot on dimly lit, claustrophobic sets, the programs are, for the most part, gloomy and uninteresting. Introduce someone to Shakespeare this way, and you have done them wrong.

In my case, the damage was, mercifully, not permanent. The first one I saw was “The Comedy of Errors,” (to this day, the only one I’ve seen in its entirety) which featured The Who’s Roger Daltry as the goofy Dromio twins. He hasn’t performed Shakespeare since, for which there is good reason. I watched it in advance of playing one of the other twins for a high school production. Probably a bad choice. When one of the Bard’s comedies is in capable hands, it’s as laugh-out-loud hilarious as “The Big Bang Theory.”

To be fair, I’m sure my own acting made Daltry look like Laurence Olivier.

Years later, I would see a few clips from “Hamlet.” A theater instructor advised me to watch Derek Jacobi in a couple scenes. He’s great, of course. A lot of those actors they were serious heavyweights: John Gielgud, Claire Bloom, Anthony Hopkins, Ben Kingsley, Patrick Stewart, etc. Enormous talent all the way around, and yet trapped in a world of stifling tedium. British director Michael Bogdanov famously called the series “the greatest disservice to Shakespeare in the last 25 years.” Not all critics were as harsh, but most were unimpressed. It was the cultural equivalent of forcing viewers to eat their broccoli -- because it's good for you!

Every year, prior to visits to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, I devise an elaborate study plan for the plays. I’ve been dutifully checking off my “to read” list for “Cymbeline” the last few weeks, in anticipation of seeing it later this month. I’ve read the play itself once all the way through, and again in pieces. Also, essays by Harold Bloom, Marjorie Garber, Issac Asimov, the lengthy intros in the Pelican, New Cambridge and Arden editions. I get a little crazy about it.

Crazy enough, even, to include on my “to do” list a viewing of the BBC production of whatever play we plan to see. I don’t know why I even bother with it anymore, knowing that it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll actually watch it. That hasn’t happened since “Comedy of Errors” in the Reagan years.

In his endlessly useful book “The Rough Guide to Shakespeare,” Andrew Dickson observes that one of the curiosities about the BBC project was that the stuffy sensibility tended to work better with Shakespeare’s so-called “problem” comedies, and “Cymbeline” qualifies. So how bad could it be, with Helen Mirren as Imogen?

Well, I gave it a go, and thanks largely to Mirren, I lasted about 45 minutes. Here you have a play that is essentially a fairy tale dressed up as historical drama, but everyone in the BBC version takes the business way too seriously.

Take Iachimo, the rogue who bets Posthumous that he can seduce his wife Imogen. Bloom is on the mark when he suggests that Danny Kaye would have been ideal for this sort of thing. That I can see. But instead, Robert Lindsay is nearly as creepy as Jeremy Renner in “Dahmer.” That’s not to say he isn’t good – just close your eyes and listen to his commentary after he pops out of the trunk in Imogen’s bedroom; he speaks the language beautifully. But he’s in the wrong play. He’s playing Iago. Picture Danny Kaye as Iago, and you’ll understand how ridiculous it is.

Later, there’s a remarkable scene in which Imogen awakes next to the headless body of Cloten, who – being dressed in Posthumus’ clothing – is mistaken for her exiled husband. Mirren goes deep and dark, concluding the scene by repeatedly smearing blood on her face.

This 1982 production, directed by Elijah Moshinsky, raises a legitimate question: Did Shakespeare really intend “Cymbeline” to be taken so seriously? Perhaps. When I read the play the first time, the beheading of Cloten caught me off guard – a true WTF? moment. I describe it as a fairy tale, but I suppose one must remember that those old folk stories are full of gruesome violence, abuse and cruelty. Given the multiple plots that run through “Cymbeline,” a director could approach it any number of ways, but it seems to me that someone who wants to go deep and dark with a play like this would be well advised to keep his tongue firmly in cheek.  Iachimo is no Iago, Imogen (though the most appealing character in the play) is no Rosiland, and Posthumus is certainly no Romeo.

I’m looking forward to seeing this in Ashland. I've avoided the reviews, but I’ve heard that the folks in Ashland basically play it like Disney, which strikes me as clever choice. Interestingly, a play that so far has been avoided by Hollywood goes before the cameras this month in New York with Ethan Hawke as Posthumus and Ed Harris in the title role. Michael Almereyda, who directed Hawke in his 2000 “Hamlet,” presides over the project, which reportedly will have “corrupt cops clash with a drug-dealing biker gang.” That might work. But probably not. 

The coffee table in our living room is a repository of books.

Down below, you will find handsome and occasionally weighty tomes such as Gardner’s “Art Through the Ages,” Nigel Rodgers’ massive “Ancient Rome,” “The World Atlas of Wine,” and the only Godfather book I’ll ever need, “The Annotated Godfather.” The slimmest volume, curiously, has the most expansive title: “Catalogue of the Universe,” published back in 1979.

On top of the table are the books that matter, the books we actually read. More than half a dozen of Norman Bridwell’s “Clifford” books, for starters. I’m not particularly fond of them, but these are the books my 4-year-old boy Silas currently devours, and so that is what we read. A couple months ago, he went through an intense “Frog and Toad” phase, which was immensely pleasurable for both of us. One, a worn but intact Scholastic paperback “Frog and Toad are Friends” was mine when I was a kid.

We’ve also taken a few runs through Anne Hunter’s “Possum’s Harvest Moon,” which was a pleasant surprise. I grabbed that off the library shelf thinking he wouldn’t go for it, but he did when I casually introduced it, and he’s actually requested additional readings. The last week or so, he’s been obsessed with “Arthur’s Birthday Party,” which he insists be read multiple times per sitting. Marc Brown’s books aren’t among my favorites, but it’s what Silas wants, so it’s what we read.

These single-book obsessions have occurred ever since he showed an interest in books. I am told this is normal, so I’m not worried, even if it becomes tedious. One morning this month, I awoke early, shortly before 6 or so, got up and realized Silas’ bedroom door was open. He knows he is not supposed to be up until the “owl” (a clock) turns green at 7 a.m. He had retreated to the living room, sitting quietly on one end of the couch as dawn’s warm glow began to fill the room. He was lost in a book on his lap, reading in a way that perhaps at some level he understands, but cannot articulate.

I slipped quietly back to bed. Sure, he was breaking a house rule, but a far more egregious violation would have been to interrupt bliss.

That Silas has the ability and will to choose his books hit me during a recent library trip. We were looking for books about airplanes. It was refreshing to get out of the picture book room for a while and browse the non-fiction shelves. So I pulled a few down, and we had our little nest there in the aisle. And then, his eye fell upon the Hindenburg.

He pulled down a copy of Patrick O’Brien’s “The Hindenburg,” a 33-page picture-heavy books suitable for – I have no idea.  Kids maybe 10 and up? But definitely not 4-year-olds.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the orange inferno on the cover.

“That’s a fire,” I replied, feeling uncomfortable. I suddenly remembered his favorite tune from the world of Thomas the Tank Engine – “Accidents Happen Now and Again.”

“They had an accident.”

He wanted to take it home. I didn’t exactly say no, but casually directed his attention elsewhere, and he eventually moved on. I put it back. 

Last week we were back there again, this time hunting for books about submarines. The cover of a recent issue of National Geographic features James Cameron, having dived to the deepest part of the ocean. (It’s a terrific piece, by the way.) Silas has been inspecting pictures of Cameron’s submersible. So we returned to the library to hunt for submarine books. As it so happens, they reside next to the airplane books, which are next to the books about blimps.

Again, “The Hindenburg” came down, and he began flipping through it. And it hit me: I’m not in charge. Oh, I may be in charge of what I allow him to take home – it’s my library card, after all – but I am not in charge of what appeals to him. Of the thousands of images that fall within his field of vision every day, I have no control over his desire to revisit the ones that, for whatever reason, he finds interesting. So I sat there, watching him inspect images – nothing terribly graphic, really – from that awful day in 1937 at the New Jersey airfield. Someday, not today, but someday, I’ll have to explain what happened. I will have to tell him that people died. Even worse, I will have to explain the swastika.

This Hindenburg thing has had me thinking – thinking about books I encountered in my youth that led to awful places. Sneaking peeks at “The Exorcist” at the local library. Eli Weisel’s “Night.” Robert Cormier’s “After the First Death,” in which a father, for the sake of a greater good, sacrifices his son’s innocence. Of course, I was much older than four at the time. I also vaguely recall a young adult novel about child abuse. The title escapes me, which is just as well. I would not be able to read it today.

It’s had me thinking about the books in our house. Some of the graphic novels parked on a floor-level shelf should gravitate elsewhere – Clive Barker’s “Hellraiser” comics, “A History of Violence,” and “I Am Legend,” to name a few obvious candidates. And yet I must reconcile that impulse with my desire to introduce Silas to Shakespeare, whose delightful comedies sit next to plays like “King Lear,” “Macbeth” and the hyper-violent “Titus Andronicus, written by Shakespeare during what I call his Tarantino phase.

It’s all about timing, context and being available for guidance. Censorship is not the goal, and never will be. Art is the cognition of life itself, and exposure to stories is one way children learn about fear. In one of the “Frog and Toad” stories, Frog tells Toad the tale of the “Big Dark Frog.” Not surprisingly, that became one of his favorites. His pre-school teacher explains: Silas is teaching himself about unsettling emotions, to show himself that he can deal with them.

Ultimately, the lesson the Hindenburg drove home for me is that I need to be ready for the inevitable questions, and that I’d better not sound like a jabbering idiot when I provide the answers. Because the questions about the world are starting to come, and the world Silas inhabits is filled with books.