So, I thought some of you might enjoy doing the Proust Questionnaire, a pre-internet online quiz. Below I give the questions and then mine and Proust's answers.
1. The principal aspect of my personality:
Proust: The need to be loved; more precisely, the need to be caressed and spoiled much more than the need to be admired
RT: Introverted intuition as it relates to narrative creation. Even as a child I told the stories my siblings used to create games.
2. The quality that I desire in a man:
Proust: Feminine charm
RT: I can’t best Proust’s answer.
3. The quality that I desire in a woman:
Proust: Manly virtues, and the union of friendship.
RT: See above.
4. What I appreciate most about my friends:
Proust: To have tenderness for me, if their personage is exquisite enough to render quite high the price of their tenderness
RT: Exploring associative ideas in quick succession during long conversations that feel too short.
5. My main fault:
Proust: Not knowing, not being able to "want".
RT: Not seeing the trees for the forest.
6. My favourite occupation:
Proust: Loving.
RT: Spontaneously writing a story.
7. My dream 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.
RT: Being part of a story that is larger than me.
8. What would be my greatest misfortune?
Proust: Not to have known my mother or my grandmother.
RT: Being stuck in highly alienated, team-based work without any social function.
9. What I should like to be:
Proust: Myself, as the people whom I admire would like me to be.
RT: A stoic sage.
10.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
RT: The ultimate nowhere, utopia.
11.My favourite colour:
Proust: The beauty is not in the colours, but in their harmony.
RT: Blue
12.The flower that I like:
Proust: Hers/His - and after, all of them.[3]
RT: Nelumbo nuciferia
13.My favourite bird:
Proust: The swallow.
RT: Great white heron
14.My favourite prose authors:
Proust: Currently, Anatole France and Pierre Loti.
RT: Besides Proust, Thomas More, Ágota Kristóf, Ursula K. Le Guin, etc.
15.My favourite poets:
Proust: Baudelaire and Alfred de Vigny.
RT: Rumi, William Blake, Charles Simic, Fernando Pessoa, Christina Rossetti, too many.
16.My heroes in fiction:
Proust: Hamlet.
RT: Prince Myshkin, Uchiha Itachi, Gwynplaine, Matsugae Kiyoaki, Arkady Bogdanov, Orlando, Loki, far too many.
17.My favourite heroines in fiction:
Proust: Bérénice.
RT: Antigone, Hiroko Ai, Lyra Belacqua, Artemis, Lusheeta Toel Ur Laputa, Orlando, Loki, far too many
18.My favourite composers:
Proust: Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann.
RT: Ruggero Leoncavallo, Richard Wagner, Johann Sebastian Bach.
