Happy Birthday Proust (is that a question?)

Posted on July 11, 2014 in Culture, Writing

If you are as voracious a reader of Vanity Fair as I am, the Proust questionnaire will be familiar to you. Featuring on the back page of every issue since 1993, the questionnaire originated as a bit of fun in the 1880s as a sort of personality test between friends. Today it’s still both a bit of fun and a sort of personality test, so I thought I’d give it a crack in honour of Marcel Proust’s birthday!

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
No demands

What is your most marked characteristic?
Passionate ambivalence

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Being here.

What is your greatest fear?
Finding myself at the point when I no longer want to be here.

What historical figure do you most identify with?
Dorothy Parker.

Which living person do you most admire?
Anyone who can drink a bottle of vodka and get up the next morning without a hangover.

Who are your heroes in real life?
The ones who don’t seek sympathy.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Procrastination

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Willful ignorance

What is your favorite journey?
The one that leads me home

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Sympathy and originality.

Which word or phrases do you most overuse?
Anything with four letters

What is your greatest regret?
Just one?

What is your current state of mind?
Melancholy

If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
The stress.

What is your most treasured possession?
Charlie.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Feeling unlovable.

Where would you like to live?
In the present.

What is your favorite occupation?
Daydreaming.

What is the quality you most like in a man?
Dignity.

What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Whatever the quality is that makes a woman intelligently, wittily, imaginatively curious about the world.

What are your favorite names?
Moet & Chandon

What is your motto?
“We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars” Oscar Wilde