Proust Questionnaire

1. What is your present state of mind?
Ambitious, renewed.

2. What is your greatest fear?
Being consumed by our culture.

3. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Real freedom. Freedom from money, work, and everything that comes with our society. Living a sustainable, self supporting life.

4. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
Adam

5. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Selfishness

6. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Unkindness

7. What is your greatest extravagance?
Interesting T-shirts

8. What is your favorite journey?
Journeys of the mind.

9. On what occasion do you lie?
When no good will come of the truth.

10. Where would you like to live?
A cabin in the woods.

11. Which historical figure do you most despise?
Muhammad or the Apostle Paul

12. Which living person do you most despise?
Life's too short.

13. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
"No worries."

14. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
What: books - Who: my family

15. What is your greatest regret?
Taking my first drink.

16. When and where were you happiest?
These moments must be taken as they come. There's a lot to be happy about if you look for it.

17. If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
My family are miserable, horrible people for the most part. Make of that what you will.

18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I'd be a better communicator.

19. What do you most value in your friends?
Genuineness and loyalty.

20. What is your principal defect?
I don't know anymore.

21. What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?
To work for 50 years and die, leaving nothing but children who do the same.

22. What would you like to be?
Free. I want to get away from most everything I was born into.

23.What natural gift would you like most to possess?
Hunting.

24. To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
Junk food.

25. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Bravery.

26. In what country would you like to live?
Tibet.

27. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Coming as far as I have.

28. What do you regard as the lowest depths of misery?
Complete and utter hopelessness. I've been there.

29. What is your most treasured possession?
My books.

30. What is your most marked characteristic?
I like to learn.

31. What is the quality you most appreciate in a man?
Just being yourself.

32. What is the quality you most appreciate in a woman?
Same answer.

33. Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
Ishmael, Andy Dufresne, Albus Dumbledore

34. Who are your heroes in real life?
Daniel Quinn and Richard Dawkins

35. How would you like to die?
Having accomplished something.

36. If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, who or what do you think it would be? If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be?
No point answering the first part. If I could chose to come back as something, I'd chose to be a member of a tribal society which has never encountered the outside world.

37. What is your favorite: color, flower, bird, and occupation?
Pink, sunflower, macaw, writer/naturalist

38. Who are your favorite writers, composers, painters, and poets?(I'm also going to add filmmakers, since they didn't have those in Proust's time)
Writers: David Foster Wallace, Christopher Hitchens, Stephen King, Alan Moore, Daniel Quinn, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.G. Wells, Samuel Delany, Mark Twain, H.P. Lovecraft
Composers: It's true that I've mostly stopped listening to music besides classical, jazz, or ambient, and in that spirit: Bach, Wagner, Stravinsky, Miles Davis, Brian Eno, Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, Richard D. James
Painters: Goya, Blake, Dore, Beksinski, Giger, Alex Ross
Poets: Walt Whitman, Robert Browning, William Carlos Williams
Filmmakers: Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, F.W. Murnau, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Harmony Korine, Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson, Walt Disney

39. What is your motto?
"A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men."