proust questionnaire
usually what you get from me on tuesdays is an unformed litany of ways i am trying to make sense of my life. which perhaps serves more to introduce you to who i am and what i am doing here, but hey, if you can’t stand on formality for pointless reasons, what are you even doing? besides, i don’t have an official introduction on this page—i assume everyone knows who i am—and this is a way to remedy that.
the proust questionnaire is a set of questions answered by marcel proust1 in a confession album, based on a parlour game he popularized. proust, in case you are unaware, is the author of the french masterpiece in search of lost time. this is one case of the long complicated book everyone says is really good being really good. today i will follow the confessions questions (1885 or 1886, depending on who you ask) as a means of introduction, adding the two confidences questions (1891 or 1892) that don’t appear in the first iteration. in the spirit of sharing, there may be a few questions that don’t appear in either, but that i sourced from my research on confession albums.2
your favourite virtue?
kindness.
the principal aspect of your personality?
neurosis.
your favourite quality in a man?
she needed my help, not my confession — dan humphrey. (in all seriousness, emotional intelligence.)
your favourite quality in a woman?
wit, without exception.
what you appreciate the most in your friends.
the ability to appreciate nuance, in short, in a longer form, the ability to look at the world and evaluate it while keeping in mind broader circumstances, patterns, and trends. my dearest friends have always been the people who could look at the world and love it in spite of everything they saw in it.
your main fault.
anger.
your favourite occupation?
writing, perhaps in particular the feeling of writing a very good phrase or paragraph or even page, when nothing in the world could deter me from finishing my sentence.
your idea of happiness?
the sea near my city, books i have written in good order on my shelf, and someone i love reading on my couch. oh, and i’d like a cat.
your idea of misery?
to achieve everything i have wanted to entirely alone.
if not yourself, who would you be?
a character in a book.
where would you like to live?
london, england, as i have wanted since i was eight years old.
your favourite colour.
almond blossom blue. but also rosy pink, like the dawn.
your favourite flower.
lilies.
your favourite bird.
not a question i’ve ever considered before, but a young hawk, specifically because the esoteric word for this is soare and that is a very useful word to begin wordle with. or else the city pigeon.
your favourite prose authors?
in no particular order: fyodor dostoyevsky, emily brontë, sylvia plath, jane austen, leo tolstoy, elena ferrante, joan didion, vladimir nabokov, victor hugo, ernest hemingway, f. scott fitzgerald, virginia woolf, henry james, charles dickens, ottessa moshfegh, and sally rooney. i’m not sure how many i’m allowed. i’d be remiss not to add marcel proust, though.
my favourite poets.
sylvia plath, richard siken, emily dickinson, anna akhmatova, frank o’hara, robert frost. e.e. cummings. and rainer maria rilke.
your favourite heroes in fiction.
those imprisoned inside a narrative of their own making. storytellers. tragedies.
your favourite painters.
vincent van gogh, forever.
your pet aversion.
people who block the entire escalator while using it. common courtesy is to stay to one side if you’d like to stand, and allow others to pass on the other. i do not know why so many people don’t get this.
what is your present state of mind?
like the sea, floating between extremes.
for what fault have you most toleration?
ignorance.
your favourite motto.
let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. just keep going. no feeling is final. — rainer maria rilke.
i encourage you to fill out a confession book yourself: whether for the pleasure of simulating an interview or to exchange with friends, either is good, it’s a parlour game i think ought to come back into fashion.
all my love,
arden.
somewhat self-evident, but it’s best to be thorough.