It has been a while since I reviewed the course of Dr.Sun from NTU. Recently, the course named Knowledge of sociology is updated, and this course is designed for graduate school students. In the lecture for introducing syllabus, he briefed on a list of to-do’s including one of the most interesting task: completing the Proust Questionnaire.
After doing some research on this scale, I found that some prestigious figures also completed this questionnaire before, including Karl Marx, whose answer is not quite shocking and commonplace, and Oscar Wilde who confessed his personal traits in his album.
In 1865, Karl Marx confessed that he considered his chief characteristic “singleness of purpose,” and that his favorite occupation was “bookworming.”
Oscar Wilde wrote in an album called “Mental Photographs, an Album for Confessions of Tastes, Habits, and Convictions” that his distinguishing feature was “inordinate self-esteem.”
So, I also tried to fill in this form to recall some of my hobbies, preferences, hopefully it will be a good reflection of my personal traits.
The Basic Proust Questionnaire is organized as below:*
1.What is your idea of perfect happiness?
To have a loving family, two children and a dog surrounded me and feel peaceful whenever confronting the obstacles or
2.What is your greatest fear?
To have something to expect while knowing I will get a terrible result, sort of imposter syndrome.
3.What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
4.What is the trait you most deplore in others?
5.Which living person do you most admire?
6.What is your greatest extravagance?
To Travel to different places with my friends and family members.
7.What is your current state of mind?
__8.__What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
__9.__On what occasion do you lie?
10.What do you most dislike about your appearance?
Perhaps the round face? I am not quite confident in my appearance since my teenager years.
11.Which living person do you most despise?
12.What is the quality you most like in a man?
- Respect comes first.
- Being patient and care for me, share the same sense of identity and ideology with me.
13.What is the quality you most like in a woman? Keeping thinking deep and being open-minded, just like Jo March who is the first generation of independent girl
14.Which words or phrases do you most overuse? “I think”.
15.What or who is the greatest love of your life?
- Reading romantic novels/watch all sorts of good movies(excluding pop-corn movies);
- My parents.
16.When and where were you happiest? At Johns Hopkins, when I was lying down on the Beach to enjoy the sunshine freely in my early 20s.
17.Which talent would you most like to have? Being tolerant to others, and differences.
18.If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? Become more patient and considerate.
__19.__What do you consider your greatest achievement?
__20.__If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
__21.__Where would you most like to live?
__22.__What is your most treasured possession?
__23.__What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
__24.__What is your favorite occupation?
__25.__What is your most marked characteristic?
26.What do you most value in your friends? Be real and sincere with each other.
27.Who are your favorite writers?
The poet Su Shi, in chinese 蘇軾, courtesy name 子瞻, art name 东坡, and he is also a pharmacologist.
28.Who is your hero of fiction?
29.Which historical figure do you most identify with?
30.Who are your heroes in real life?
My parents, who took me to this world and granted me the freedom to explore the things that I love or never touched before. They understand me, even not agreeing with what I believe, but they tried hard to grasp the essence that I shared with them. They are realistic, but they do not push me to bend. They are nice and kind to strangers, and they deserve a good life.
31.What are your favorite names?
Jo(from Little Women), Johnson(same pronunciation like my Chinese Given name “Shan”) and Alexandria(some lovely friends called me using this name).
32.What is it that you most dislike?
Being pushed to do some bullshit administrative work (documentation/coordination/illogical arguments)
33.What is your greatest regret?
Not being to have a lover in the high school.
34.How would you like to die?
In a second, not being killed by chronic disease.
35.What is your motto?
