Gulliver’s Travels is inevitably discussed in terms of utopianism, its ironic pose a critique of Thomas More’s neologism from two centuries before Swift published his greatest work (though More was himself more than a bit ironic). But Swift’s novel is far more complicated, and far sadder, than a mere rejoinder to the idea of a perfect society. The best comedy is simply tragedy divorced from melancholy, the results being paradoxically all the sadder for it. Every one of the great satirists, from Swift to Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker to Richard Pryor, had at their core the dejected emptiness of losing that which we never had access to in the first place. In the end, Gulliver’s horses are “strangers to bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me, and friendship of each other.” The final and most heartbreaking lesson then is this—that there is utopia, just not for us. {read}