Let's Play Proust

Obsessed.

I know I am, okay? You don't have to tell me.

I am evidently obsessed with the Bernard Pivot Questionnaire used by James Lipton at Inside the Actors Studio. The questionnaire came from a Proust questionnaire - and I've just stumbled again onto Proust's questions, and I love them. So here there are. Ask them to yourself. Ask them to your loved ones. Go ahead! I shouldn't be the only one driving people crazy with this stuff.

Answer as many as you want in the Reply box! I'd love to hear what you have to say. It is a very interesting exercise to think about one's own answers - and what they are telling you when you find the answers for yourself - especially once you get to heroes and heroines.

1. Your favorite virtue (the principle aspect of your personality)
(Proust answered it as "The need to be loved; more precisely, the need to be caressed and spoiled much more than the need to be admired" -- obviously he did not mean moral virtue in our more modern legalistic or religious sense. He meant the attractive thing your personality is inclined to love the best.)

Mine would be much the same, but it is more the need to be spoiled by someone who takes me seriously. I don't like being petted by someone who cannot truly see me.

2. Your favorite qualities in a man

Proust: Feminine charms

Me: Self-containment/self-mastery

3. Your favorite qualities in a woman

Proust: Manly virtues, and frankness in friendship

Me: Frankness in friendship and the ability to delight in being unique

4. Your chief characteristic

Proust didn't answer this one (Maybe he didn't know his own chief characteristic?)

Me: Keenness of mind

5. What you appreciate the most in your friends

Proust: To have tenderness for me, if their personage is exquisite enough to render quite high the price of their tenderness

Me: (yikes! I would not have liked to be Proust's friend!) The kind of honesty that starts with a willingness to let go of self-protection

6. Your main fault

Proust: Not knowing - not being able to "want"

Me: Fear

7. Your favorite occupation

Proust: loving

Me: thinking

8. Your idea of happiness

Proust: I am afraid it be not great enough, I dare not speak it, I am afraid of destroying it by speaking it.

Me: The perfect cup of coffee and the perfect croissant shared with my husband for a late breakfast on a perfect morning free of all outside demands

9. Your idea of misery (or, What would be my greatest misfortune?)

Proust: Not to have known my mother or my grandmother

Me: Not to have born children

10. If not yourself, who would you be? (or, What I should like to be)

Proust: Myself, as the people whom I admire would like me to be.

Me: (oooo! Good answer, Marcel!) A university professor, a la Dorothy Sayers

11. Where would you like to live? (or, The country where I should like to live)

Proust: A country where certain things that I should like would come true as though by magic, and where tenderness would always be reciprocated

Me: Here, now, but in a house that is finished the way it is in my imagination, with a good commuter train between here and Portland so that I wouldn't have to drive to get to Marylhurst or the Opera and Ballet

12. Your favorite color and flower

Proust: The beauty is not in the colours, but in their harmony.

Me: (oh, c'mon, Marcel!) The beauty is found in context, and neon colors are never beautiful. ("Harmony!" - what is that supposed to mean? No, no. Don't tell me. That's your answer. We'll move on.)

13. Your favorite prose authors

Proust: Currently, Anatole France and Pierre Loti. (by "currently," he meant the 1880's, when he was writing)

Me: Elizabeth Goudge, for greatness of love; Pat Conroy, for portrayal of the dignity of mankind; L.M. Montgomery, for understanding of youth; Madeleine L'Engle, for love of artistic expressions; C. S. Lewis, for making the invisible visible.

14. Your favorite poets

Proust: Baudelaire and Alfred de Vigny

Me: John Donne, and many whose names I do not yet know. This is an area of study I am anticipating entirely too much to explain.

15. Your favorite heroes in fiction

Proust: Hamlet

Me: Frodo Baggins, Jack McCall

16. Your favorite heroines in fiction

Proust: Bérénice (from the 17th century play)

Me: Elizabeth Bennett, Francesca Johnson, Emily Starr

17. Your favorite painters and composers

Proust: Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann; Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt

Me: (definitely not Proust's favorite composers for me!) I do not think of music by way of composers, and I probably should. I think of it by way of my own reaction to it. I like medieval folk music, early American folk music, symphonic music that sounds like it tells a story, Welsh hymnody, French organ music, English choirboy music, and the soundtrack to Across the Universe. I like to listen to modern symphonic composers only when I can listen in person and watch the musician at the same time, and ballet compositions only when I can watch the dancers.
For painters, give me anyone who knows what to do with the light, from the Dutch masters down to the Expressionists to today's realists.

18. Your heroes in real life

Proust: Mr. Darlu, Mr. Boutroux

Me: Saint John the Divine, Saint John Bosco, brave children everywhere

19. Your favorite heroines in real life

Proust didn't answer this one

Me: Saint Teresa of Avila, Charlotte Mason

20. What characters in history do you most dislike?

Proust did not answer this one either, which seems funny since this is his questionnaire

Me: Anyone treacherous, anyone who used power for domination

21. Your heroines in world history

Proust: Cleopatra

Me: Queen Esther, early suffragettes (the anti-abortion ones who hated what abortions did to women, not the militant tea-totallers who were the forerunners of today's pleasure police), Queen Elizabeth II

22. Your favorite food and drink

Proust -- again with the not answering questions in his own list!

Me: the crab bisque at Salty's and champagne - preferably simultaneously

23. Your favorite names

Proust: I have only one at a time

Me: French names for women, Nordic names for men

24. What I hate the most

Proust: What is bad about me

Me: lies, deceit of others, deceit of self, malice, any kind of abuse of power

25. World history characters I hate the most (or, World history characters I most despise)

Proust: I am not educated enough

Me: sentimental artists; opportunistic authors masquerading as self-help or religious gurus; all torturers and those who observe torture passively

26. The military event I admire the most

Proust: My military service!

Me: The quiet Norwegian sabotage of Nazi efforts in Norway

27. The natural talent I'd like to be gifted with (or, The gift of nature that I would like to have)

Proust: Will-power, and seductiveness

Me: the ability to paint and sculpt

28. How I wish to die

Proust: Improved and loved

Me: Ready for the life to come

29. What is your present state of mind?

Proust: Boredom from having thought about myself to answer all these questions

Me: (hahahaha! Good one, Marcel!) Expectant, eager, slightly on edge

30. For what fault have you most toleration? (or, Faults for which I have the most indulgence)

Proust: Those that I understand

Me: Impatience

31. Your favorite motto

Proust: I should be too afraid that it bring me misfortune.

Me: "Love, and do what you will." (Augustine)