by Mitchell Kalpakgian | The world’s great writers never cease to marvel at the world’s lack of common sense. Why does man, famously identified by Aristotle as a “rational animal” with an inborn desire for truth (“All men by nature desire to know,” he writes in the Metaphysics) demonstrate so many forms of folly that another great writer, Henry Fielding, remarked that a comic writer can never lack material for satire and laughter because “life everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous.”

While everyone has heard of King Midas’s avarice and his desire for The Golden Touch that transforms everything he touches into gold, not everyone has heard of The Leaden Touch. In Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book one of the children who hears of the famous story about King Midas, remarks, “But some people have what we may call ‘The Leaden Touch,’ and make everything dull and heavy that they lay their fingers upon.”

To be human is to be born with desires, to have wishes, and to experience longings. But not all wishes have the same quality, nature, or origin. Some wishes assume the shape of daydreams or fantasies as utopian visions enter the mind and people imagine impossibilities.