Advice from another century

My friend Jody posted the above page on her Instagram this morning, and I just about fell over laughing. The first two sentences alone sustain me. If I were to court Insanity, what would I wear and how would he look? I imagine I might carry forth the naked metaphor I've played with over the last few months and wear nothing. Insanity, of course, would wear old-school faded Levis and beat-up Converse high-tops. He'd be broad-shouldered and weigh closer to too much than too little. After the courting, Insanity would read aloud to me from whatever fiction he was carrying and pay all my debts in cash. When we needed to get away, Insanity would insist on Bora Bora, a hut with a glass floor over the ocean. I think Bora Bora suits your nakedness, Insanity would say as he helped smear sunscreen onto my back. But listen to this, he'd say, the other hand holding up a scruffy Yeats, opened to Adam's Curse:

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;   

We saw the last embers of daylight die,   

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky   

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell   

Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell   

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:   

That you were beautiful, and that I strove   

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown   

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

Afterward, Insanity and I would dive down under the hut and look upward at the world through the wavy blue.