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.
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.
- 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.
- Your favourite qualities in a man.
Proust: “Feminine charm.”
Z: Courage. Integrity. Intelligence.
- Your favourite qualities in a woman.
Proust: “Manly virtues, and the union of friendship.”
Z: Kindness. Grace. Intelligence.
- Your chief characteristic.
Proust: [blank]
Z: Kindness.
- 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.
- 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.
- Your favourite occupation.
Proust: “Loving.”
Z: Reading.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Your favourite colour and flower.
Proust: “The beauty is not in the colours, but in their harmony.”
Z: Dark, royal blue. Jasmine.
- Your favourite prose authors.
Proust: “Currently, Anatole France and Pierre Loti.”
Z: Marcel Proust. Leo Tolstoy. Cormac McCarthy.
- Your favourite poets.
Proust: “Baudelaire and Alfred de Vigny.”
Z: Walt Whitman. Chairil Anwar. Pablo Neruda.
- Your favourite heroes in fiction.
Proust: “Hamlet.”
Z: Pierre Bezukhov. Jean Valjean.
- Your favourite heroines in fiction.
Proust: “Berenice.”
Z: Dorothea Brooke.
- 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.
Tentang Aidilfitri IV
Tentang Aidilfitri III
On Having Your Cake, and Eating It Too
Tentang Matari
On WhatsApp (and Pressing ‘Exit Group’)
Tentang Doa
On Shoes (In Memory of Auschwitz)
Tentang Hujan
