Most days I would, at least when I'm feeling down. This is the wish that has kept me up at night. To be rid of houses, to unload that bulky old piano, to come out from under the ponderous weight of so many books, to flee the maintenance obligations of the boat that trouble my conscience every weekend. By weight of by volume, there is little I would keep. A hobo-sack, barely. I could slip away in the night with it, unnoticed. I'd keep one car, one laptop computer, six changes of clothes, and my wallet loaded with a library card. Give me a bare apartment, painted white, with a futon, a table and chairs, one set of simple dishes. Maybe I'd keep a TV for the video games - but no, my Xbox is starting to make a grinding noise and I barely use it anymore. I've been pining for a digital camera for months, too - probably it's the only thing I'd spend money on at this point - but now I think I've sucked all the savor out of that purchase by anticipating it too long, like chewing an unlit cigar until it becomes too soggy to fire up. So I don't want a digital camera; it's just another expensive toy to break down or lose.
I might keep ten of my tobacco pipes and my copy of the Riverside Shakespeare.
I suffer from Raistlin's curse. That's why I don't want any stuff. You can give me a shiny new toy and all I'll see is peeling paint and the wheels coming off. I'll think, "great, another trip to the dump." Raistlin was a character in a long series of novels by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, "mind-dribble fantasy," as Harlan Ellison would call it. It was part of a marketing machine for a series of Dungeons and Dragons modules. The novels must have been good, though, as they're still in print, and there's even an annotated version of the original trilogy available. If I wrote a trilogy today, do you think I'd get to see an annotated edition within my lifetime?
Anyway, I read those books somewhere between elementary and middle school, around the time we moved to the Cape, near a pond, around the time I was given a used aluminum canoe for my birthday. Around the pond grew several good trees for climbing. There was one in particular that leaned out over the water and then branched out into a 'y' shape, but a nice beefy 'y', with a flat space in the middle of the crotch for sitting. On the land side of it, the tree was surrounded by a narrow strip of flat space without too many briars or too much brush, but then that space was surrounded by lots of brush and lots of briars growing on a hill that rose between the tree and the distant dirt road. The space was inaccessable except by canoe. Private. Some summer days, my mother would ask me what I did all day, as I headed out with the canoe and a sandwich and a book. I could tell her the truth because I knew she could never find me and put a stop to it. (Children had a greater sense of personal sovereignity in those days, I think. Now if they need their own space they have to go to myspace, and parents don't even want to allow them that danger.) What I would tell my mother was this: I climb trees, but most especially one tree. I think. I savor the motion of the tree as it sways out over the water. I watch ducks floating or fish swimming around the roots of the tree and sometimes throw them the crusts of my sandwich. I read, mostly, but when the wind blows I listen to the sighing of the leaves and wonder how much pleasure can really be expected of a day like this. For happiness, with me, is always tainted by the certainty, of losing it. There was no doubt the leaves would soon fall, the land would become someone's private property and get developed, a big shiny house would perch itself on the hill and then slowly decay and crumble. This was coming. So today I would force myself to stay and take what I could from the place, reading until it got too dark to read, and even feeling a little guilty that while I was losing myself in the world of the book, I was missing out on the fleeting happiness around me.
In the book, though, Raistlin was a wizard (those in the know would call him a mage). In some kind of wizard boot-camp (they hold it in a tower) he picked up a curse that turned the shape of his pupils to hourglasses, and from that point on he couldn't see anything but decay. He'd look at a beautiful woman and see her breasts sag and her skin wrinkle and, eventually, her hair fall out while her eyes putrified and dropped back into her skull. If he looked at a tree, he'd see it wither and die, topple, and get consumed by termites. I wasn't sure, as I read this, exactly how this would work, although I imagined that the world looked like a bunch of racing time-lapse photography movies to him. But did the animation of decay begin the moment he cast his gaze on something, and then proceed from there? If he looked away and looked back, would this reset the vision? Would it decay from scratch? Could he blink to reset it? Could he, by batting his eyes at the beautiful woman, behold for a fraction of a second of each blink her true and present freshness?
These were the sorts of things that used to keep me up at night: wondering just how these magical powers and curses would manifest themselves, logically. As I got older, I thought that maybe the eye-curse just gave him an awareness of decay, and that the actual vision of things breaking down was supplied by his imagination, his subconscious. It would have to work this way, or else he would have been rendered functionally blind as things decayed into stumps and were not where he saw them.
But no, this psychological explanation will not stand. I remember a scene where he met in immortal princess, some special subspecies of elf, and was amazed that, as an immortal, she did not wither and decay in his gaze. This means that his problem could not be psychological. It wasn't a depressed mind just assuming the doom of each moment and extrapolating future decay. His eyes were actually seeing the future of each thing he looked at, or at least the destruction coming in that future. He saw no decay in the princess because she would not decay, and he saw that before he knew that. If there was a psychological component, it was simply dwelling on the ugliest aspents of everything's future. (For in watching the decay of a tree, could he not have taken some pleasure in the thriving of the termites?)
I wonder, though, if in our world Raistlin wouldn't have made a good investor? Couldn't he look at the stock page of the Wall Street Journal and watch the numbers animate and dance into the future for him? Even if it was only the doomed numbers that dropped and disappeared, even if the curse only showed him the worst of what lay in the future for all of us, he could still invest in the other numbers, the still ones, and lose no money.
But no, the numbers would not dance for him. They'd sit still, as printed numbers do, and beneath them the paper would yellow and crumble and blow away. Such is the nature of depression.
It seems that these were really good books, now that I really get to rememberin' on em. Raistlin had a brother, Cameron, I think, who was Raistlin's opposite in Dungeons and Dragons terms: high STR and CON and low to middlin' INT and WIS. He was a warrior thick and dumb, but he had a heart of gold and gave up everything for his brother, who as a mage was vulnerable but would ultimately command a lot more power than any of the other characters. (Have you seen some of those ninth level spells?) Cameron was devoted to his brother despite the fact that Raistlin was bitter, cynical, depressed, caustic, and acerbic. You can understand why he'd be like that, with a curse like that. But he was also, increasingly, evil. I'd say his alignment worked its way, novel by novel, from neutral-good to chaotic-evil. If I hadn't given away all my old D&D modules I could look this up. But this raises a big question: how far do you go to support someone who is mentally ill, when that mental illlness makes them evil? Does the bond of brotherhood make it right for that Bulger brother to protect Whitey if Whitey committed his crimes because of some mental instability? Does the bond of marriage make it right for a woman to protect her depressed husband after he's abused their kids? Would it be different if her husband's evil stemmed from his upbringing, or schizophrenia, or something else beyond his control?
The thing about the Dungeons and Dragons, you had your alignment right there, you printed it on your character sheet: good, neutral, or evil. Whether real evil exists in the real world (and this athiest thinks that it does), we could posit for the sake of the game that it does, and from that point on it was a definite, mathematical quantity we could wrap our heads around. It made it easier to kill hobgoblins and mind-flayers. They were evil; it said so right in the Monster Manual. By being set in the world of this game, though, these novels showed that even if evil was a definite quantity, even if it was stamped on your character sheet like a tattoo across your forehead, you could still have a brother who was dumb but good in that sincere way dumb people have of being good (because they have no room in their heads for disingenuousness) who would still love, care for, and help you. Maybe he loves you for what you used to be. Maybe he cares for you because he hopes you'll be that way again. Maybe he helps you because he doesn't realize the depth of your evil. He's trapped in a game of D&D and can't step out to the level of the dice and the naked hanging lightbulb over the table and look at your character sheet and see what's stamped there. Life would be simpler if you could read somebody's character sheet, I think. Heck, life would be simpler if you could read your own.
Cameron did what he could for his brother and it drove him to the bottle. Meanwhile, Raistlin, in his disgust for the rotting world around him, rose to the height of his powers and brought the world to a globe-shattering cataclysm. This happened in the second trilogy. I never finished it, because Summer ended and school started back up. Maybe it's because I stopped there, in those books, that I've since felt that good meaning people have done a lot of harm by helping the evil people they love.