That would be a horrifying story about almost any other baby, but since it is about the baby who would grow up to be Buster Keaton, it’s both horrifying and funny, because it so neatly presages the multifold woes that Keaton would pile one on top of the other to create his indelible works of comic genius. So neatly, sadly, that it makes you wonder if it’s true. Keaton’s widow, the late Eleanor Keaton, tells the story in “Buster Keaton Remembered” (Abrams), a new posthumous book of reminiscences and biography written with film historian Jeffrey Vance. She probably heard it from her husband. Still, stories that sound too good to be true usually are. On the other hand, a lot of the facts about Keaton’s childhood sound just as outlandish, and they are a matter of record. For starters, Buster, born Joseph Frank Keaton, got his nickname from Harry Houdini, a friend of the family. And what a family. The vaudeville act of “The Fighting Keatons” concentrated almost completely on the category known as knockabout farce. Think WWF played for laughs. Keaton’s father would hurl his kid down a flight of stairs and throw him across the stage and into the audience. (Buster wore a door handle in the back of his stage costume to make the throwing more accurate.) They called him “The Human Mop” because the father would literally mop up the stage floor with his son.

My interest in Keaton was rekindled in the last couple of months by a pair of new Kino DVDs, “Arbuckle and Keaton, Vols. 1 & 2,” restorations of the comedy film shorts the team produced between 1917 and 1920. These movies are the first that Keaton appears in, and right from the start you can see that he already has the Buster thing, the cornball-as-hip attitude, down cold. (OK, he had 20 years in vaudeville to hone his persona, but no one had to teach Keaton how to play to the camera-he was just a born movie actor.) Most of these movies don’t have a plot, they have a situation. It’s Fatty and Buster as bellboys, or Fatty and Buster as garage mechanics who double as firemen. Unsophisticated? Not any more than “Scary Movie” or its sequel-and a lot funnier.

But the most remarkable thing about these DVDs is that they are so accessible. I don’t mean the comedy, although you certainly don’t need to be a film scholar to get the jokes. I mean, quite simply, that you can get your hands on this stuff now with astonishing ease. Six months ago, I’d never heard of the Arbuckle-Keaton shorts, and now I can curl up in front of the tube and watch them all night long. So, say what you like about the current state of culture. Our ability to ignore the present and seek solace in past wonders more than makes up for any deficiencies in the current scene, musical, cinematic, you name it. What can you get? What can’t you get?

Lately I’ve been wallowing in an excess of riches, watching Keaton and Arbuckle and listening nonstop to three new Columbia releases of Monk: “Monk in Tokyo,” “Thelonius Monk-Live at the Jazz Workshop Complete” (which includes 12 previously unreleased tracks) and an anthology, “Thelonious Monk, the Columbia Years 1962-1968.” I know, I know, this is not the purist’s Monk, the Monk on Riverside or the Monk on Atlantic with Art Blakey. By 1962, Monk had more or less stopped composing new tunes. But he sure hadn’t stopped playing. His performances on these albums are revelatory. And inspiring. After immersing myself in these recordings, I bought some sheet music and started teaching myself to play “Well You Needn’t.” How far have I come? About as far as learning that I’ve completely forgotten the bass clef since those childhood piano lessons. But it’s coming back. And the act of slowly, painstakingly working my way through the music one bar at a time is the best way I’ve found yet to understand how the song is put together.

This, I believe, is the most persuasive rebuttal to the charge that all this access to old material only makes us more passive, more willing to just sit back and listen and watch. I don’t think so. I think it makes us more curious, greedier to get out there and find more, learn more. If I can’t hear “Well You Needn’t,” how am I ever going to want to learn how to play it?

Buster Keaton loved to tell a story about the making of “Sherlock Jr.,” the 1924 film where, playing a movie projectionist, he falls asleep and dreams that he steps into the film on the screen. Everything you see happening in this movie actually happened. Keaton did his own stunts, so if he’s seen walking across the cars of a moving railroad train, he’s really walking on that train. (What you don’t see-and what Keaton didn’t even realize until he had an X-ray years later-is that when the water from the water tower blasts him onto the railroad track, it actually broke his neck.) One of the scenes he stumbles into involves lions, and in 1924 there were no computer graphics to help him out. The lions and Buster shared the same soundstage. There was a cage to protect the crew, but the lions and Buster were locked up together. The scene was shot without incident, but when the cameraman told Keaton they’d have to shoot the scene again for the negative that would be sent to European markets, the usually unflappable Keaton shot back, “They ain’t going to see this scene in Europe!” Oh, but they will, Buster, they will now.