The other day, I was searching online for an image that might go well with the phrase “incurable romantic.” This is because I was working on a speech—well, more like a riff, really—about curable romantics.
What is a curable romantic? Somebody who only catches yearning like the flu? Somebody who wants to believe that love conquers less than all--like maybe Poland but not the rest of Europe? Somebody who wades into the idea of love, but only up to the knees, because sharks? And is there a vaccine for this? How exactly do you cure a curable romantic—besides forcing a man to watch Jennifer Aniston movies, and a woman to watch a man watching American football? (After which you become an incurable cynic.) (So what’s a curable cynic then? Besides maybe Scrooge before he’s visited by the ghosts. Or is Scrooge a curable misanthrope?)
(You get the idea—I’m an incurable monologist.)
So I go to Google Images and I type in the phrase "incurable romantic," and I get a screen that looks like this—
—where 9 out of 20 images refer back to the same phrase:
ME: Now THAT’S something you don’t see every
day.
MY LIBIDO: File under S for sadly.
And when I click on the image, I start reading about this artist called Harland Miller, who creates paintings like old Penguin book covers, with the craziest titles ever. Which sent me to his website, which I scrolled through while I opened up another window and started searching for all the Penguin paintings of his that I could find.
There are a ton of them out there. Some of my favorites are below. And if you want to read about Miller, here’s his website:
(I especially like the Hemingway and the Mailer titles. Not just because I’d pay cash money to read them, but because, when I think about it, I kind of already have.)
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