In his poem, “Roses,” William Carlos Williams writes, “The imagination, across the sorry facts, lifts us to make roses.”  The poem can be uplifting or cynical, depending on its interpretation.  When I sat down to write this piece, I was going to say that the poem was needlessly negative.  Are the “facts” really that “sorry”?  And can’t the mind work in an opposite way, so that everything around us is really rather nice but appears abysmal?  Conversely, writers, for years, have been fascinated with the concept of disillusionment.  Our minds build castles in the sky, and when those castles collapse, we see a depressing reality – or so the story goes sometimes.  This was clearly Charles Beaumont’s interest in “The Magic Man,” a short story in his Perchance to Dream anthology – a story that isn’t scary, per se, but that subtly leads us to the darker crevices of the human psyche.  (There will be some spoilers in this review). Continue reading “The Sting of Disillusionment” →