Month: May 2023

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On Being Here

A reminder: when the future seems murky, or even meaningless, often all you can do is just to be present and focused on the Here and Now – do your best, and trust that He will be there for you.

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On The Proust Questionnaire

The Proust Questionnaire is a set of questions answered by one of my most favourite authors, the French writer Marcel Proust. The questions started out as a popular Victorian parlour game, but has taken a life of its own, as a prod for others to reflect on things important to them, and as a way of sharing their perspective and selfhood with others.

Today, I thought I’d take a stab at the questions, and see how I go. To make this a tad more amusing (at least for my own self), I thought I’d list down Proust’s answers, alongside my own.

  1. Your favourite virtue.

Proust: “The need to be loved; more precisely, the need to be caressed and spoiled much more than the need to be admired.”

Z: Loyalty and Reliability.

  1. Your favourite qualities in a man.

Proust: “Feminine charm.” 

Z: Courage. Integrity. Intelligence.

  1. Your favourite qualities in a woman.

Proust: “Manly virtues, and the union of friendship.”

Z: Kindness. Grace. Intelligence. 

  1. Your chief characteristic.

Proust: [blank]

Z: Kindness. 

  1. 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.”

Z: The integrity and strength of character to be able to share their innermost thoughts and concerns with me – to be fully “real” with me in sharing who they are as human beings.

  1. Your main fault.

Proust: “Not knowing, not being able to ‘want’.”

Z: Lack of courage. Fearfulness in trying something new, or making a fateful decision. 

  1. Your favourite occupation. 

Proust: “Loving.”

Z: Reading. 

  1. 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.”

Z: Reading a good book while sitting at home with Jah and Monkey.

  1. Your idea of misery.

Proust: “Not to have known my mother or my grandmother.”

Z: To be hard at work in an office, doing something utterly meaningless and Sisyphean. 

  1. If not yourself, who would you be?

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

Z: A mathematician, or an author. Someone who works with numbers and/or words.

  1. Where would you 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.”

Z: In a small cottage with great Internet connection and a full shelf of books in Cambridge, England.

  1. Your favourite colour and flower.

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

Z: Dark, royal blue. Jasmine.

  1. Your favourite prose authors.

Proust: “Currently, Anatole France and Pierre Loti.”

Z: Marcel Proust. Leo Tolstoy. Cormac McCarthy. 

  1. Your favourite poets. 

Proust: “Baudelaire and Alfred de Vigny.”

Z: Walt Whitman. Chairil Anwar. Pablo Neruda. 

  1. Your favourite heroes in fiction.

Proust: “Hamlet.”

Z: Pierre Bezukhov. Jean Valjean. 

  1. Your favourite heroines in fiction.

Proust: “Berenice.”

Z: Dorothea Brooke. 

  1. Your favourite painters and composers.

Proust: “Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann.”

Z: Van Gogh, Turner, Monet, Degas. Bach, Chopin, Mahler, George Michael, M Nasir, Ebiet G Ade.