Play is a Perfection That is Not Improved by Gilding

In his classic book A Sand County Almanac , Aldo Leopold, the man sometimes credited as the father of modern wildlife ecology, wrote, "It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it." He was writing specifically about natural places, but he could have been talking about just about any perfect thing with which we humans…