I would like to take you seriously but to do so would affront your intelligence.

I would like to take you seriously but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural death is the obscene mystery the ultimate affront the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

Young men soon give and soon forget affronts old age is slow in both.