William Gibson's The Seesaw Log is a book about the theatre in, as it were, its very essence, and it seems to me that it is as interesting as such a book could possibly be.

Now that I have set down that statement, I see that it may sound ambiguous, and that it may suggest ambivalence on my part, but I let it stand as representing the division of my feelings, not about the book but about the theatre. I was the boy who refused to wave his handkerchief to keep Tinker Bell from dying, even though it was Maude Adams who pleaded, and I despised the children who did wave, and also envied them, and was glad they could help make so moving an event by their silliness.

Some part of me is repelled by the theatre. The histrionic personality bores me (after the first half-hour, in which it is usually charming).