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March 21, 2005
TT: Answer man
It happens that I've never filled out the celebrated Proust Questionnaire, so when I saw that Searchblog had done so the other day, I thought that doing the same thing might be a nice note on which to hit the road.Here goes:
- What is your most marked characteristic? Curiosity.
- What is the quality you most like in a man? The ability to argue without becoming angry.
- What is the quality you most like in a woman? A sense of the absurd.
- What do you most value in your friends? Kindness and warmth.
- What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Impatience.
- What is your favorite occupation? Conversation with a loved one over a good meal.
- What is your idea of perfect happiness? The same, minus the meal and in closer proximity.
- What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Siegfried.
- In which country would you like to live? This one, in the Fifties.
- Who are your favorite writers? Johnson, Trollope, Dostoevsky, James, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Colette, Waugh, Flannery O'Connor, M.F.K. Fisher.
- Who are your favorite poets? Shakespeare, Dickinson, Hardy, Frost, Yeats, Auden, Larkin.
- Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Father Hugh Kennedy, in Edwin O'Connor's The Edge of Sadness. Runner-up: Lucky Jim Dixon.
- Who is your favorite heroine of fiction? Vicky Haven, in Dawn Powell's A Time to Be Born.
- Who are your favorite composers? Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Fauré, Stravinsky, Ravel, Britten, Copland. (If I could add a jazz musician, it'd be Jim Hall.)
- Who are your favorite painters? Chardin, Constable, Cézanne, Bonnard, Morandi, John Marin, Milton Avery, Hans Hofmann, Fairfield Porter, Helen Frankenthaler.
- What are your favorite names? Anne, Ali, Erin, Heather, Kate, Laura, Libby, Tanaquil (all accented on the first syllable, for what it's worth).
- What is it that you most dislike? Smugness. "I detest a man who knows that he knows" (Justice Holmes).
- Which talent would you most like to have? I wish I could dance like Fred Astaire. (I wish I could walk like Fred Astaire.) Failing that, I wish I could play drums like Dave Tough.
- How would you like to die? In a state of grace, after having seen my last, best book through the press.
- What is your current state of mind? Frazzled but expectant.
- What is your motto? "Be generous and delicate and pursue the prize" (Henry James). Alternate motto for especially hectic days: "If there's no alternative, there's no problem" (James Burnham).
Posted March 21, 2005 12:02 PM
