Desire: Our Earliest Language

Desire is primal: to be human is to want. Consider that wanting is the earliest language we learn. As infants, when we’re yet incapable of forming words on our tongue, we’re infinitely good at knowing what we want—and, for that matter, getting it. And if desire is as innate as I describe, it means that wanting, as part of the human experience, is not to be rejected but embraced.

I don’t mean to say that we should model our lives of wanting on the red-faced screaming of a baby who’s hungry, needs her diaper changed or has lost her pacifier, which her mother, on the basis of principle,…