Proust: Remembrance of Things Past Vol 1

Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

Voltaire: Candide [finished 12.24.08]

Hôm nay có cô học trò vào chổ làm để thâu băng video, thấy cô ta đeo cái nhẫn đính hôn làm mình cũng thấy muốn làm đám cưới cho xong khoảng đời còn lại.

Yêu một người chưa chắc lại muốn sống đời ở kiếp với người đó. Có lẽ là định mệnh của mình là vậy . Yêu, nhiều lắm, nhưng khi nghĩ đến thì lại thôi.

Đời thật là trớ trêu. Không biết đến bao giờ mình mới gặp một người mình có duyên có phận với họ.

Làm người đã khó, yêu người và yêu bản thân thì thật là khó hơn.

Vậy ta nên yêu người hay nên yêu bản thân hơn?

nothing compares 2 u - the coconutz

How hard is it to start over? I mean, how hard is it to train oneself to the way one would like to be?


In life, what manifest is the vision of whom one like to be. My vision blurred over the years. It’s not that I don’t like myself now. No. I love myself. It’s just that I feel like I’m not perfect. Perfected to whom, a character, I like me to be.
Isn’t it what Life is about? A book. And me, myself is the main character of my book, my Life.


For the longest time, I viewed my life as a Charles Dickens’s novel. The main character is so-so but the supporting casts are great and phenomenon. The supporting casts in Dickens’s novels are always noble and building the main characters. Now, I want my life to be a novel: a bit cheesy of how it would focus on the main character a bit more. Certainly not as one of Jane Austen’s characters because they are heroine and like things in order–which too restricted as a life to me. I want something easy, out-going, analytical, happy with a pinch of power and smirk. Not the comedy type, of course.


Seriously, it is hard right now. I’m not old and yet not getting any younger. I don’t want to be a kid and certainly not up to play the grown-up part. I am struggling within. Mein Kampf. My struggle. Not the Hitler’s type of book also. (Although his book was very well-written.)


OK, so tonight, I crave myself to read a book. A love novel to be exact but found none that I interest in. The Atlas Shrugged is too thick to read. After a year, I’m still at page 167. No wait, it’s 169 now since I read 2 pages while flying back from D.C. Sometimes I wonder if I ever finish that book.


So yes. How hard is it to start over…or at least to continue onto my path and make some editions to it. I guess the trick is: Keep on going and not to start anything over. Just enhance it. Yea, I like that. Enhance it. Enhance my life and my self.


There. I knew it. Writing would help me make sense of my life. And so it does. Well, for me at least. I write to make sense of my life.


Lovely.

called Self.

It might seem odd to you when I say that I haven’t looked and re-evaluated myself for quite some times now. It’s been a long, aimless journey I’ve traveled and I’ve missed my target somewhere, somehow along the way.

People who know me know that I love Lương Triều Vỹ to bits. Ok, Ok, it’s more of an obsession than love, I have to admit. And to which I found amazingly to my surprise, that the other day when I happened to come across LTV’s pictures, I realized and was able to pin-point down the old self of me. Odd eh? And I miss the old me. Yeah, I do. I will write about my old self and the connection between me-self and LTV sometime, when I have time.

Anyhow, I have determined that I should go on a new journey, not to find old self, but to create a new one. It’d be fun. I’m sure. I have a lot of plans from now ’til the end of the year. Must get on to them. A must.

On a completely different but related note, Proust Questionnaire.

The Proust Questionnaire has its origins in a parlor game popularized (though not devised) by Marcel Proust, the French essayist and novelist, who believed that, in answering these questions, an individual reveals his or her true nature. Here is the basic Proust Questionnaire.

Lies below are also my answers:

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?

• absolute happiness

2. What is your greatest fear?

•  inability to achieve goals

3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

• my worst characteristic/traits

4. What is the trait you most deplore in others?

• Egocentric

5. Which living person do you most admire?

• I have two (2) right now

6. What is your greatest extravagance?

• Love:  the only luxury I can afford.

7. What is your current state of mind?

•  zen

8. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

• all virtues are not overrated

9. On what occasion do you lie?

• no harms caused to protect life of others

10. What do you most dislike about your appearance?

11. Which living person do you most despise?

•  I don’t know a single person well enough to despise them

12. What is the quality you most like in a man?

• charisma

13. What is the quality you most like in a woman?

• confidence

14. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

15. What or who is the greatest love of your life?

•  Life

16. When and where were you happiest?

• zen

17. Which talent would you most like to have?

•  the art of nothingness

18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

• characteristics that needed to change

19. What do you consider your greatest achievement?

• absolute happiness

20. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

• myself

21. Where would you most like to live?

• in love and happiness

22. What is your most treasured possession?

• love

23. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

• loneliness

24. What is your favorite occupation?

• creating, smiling, just being

25. What is your most marked characteristic?

•  being me

26. What do you most value in your friends?

• being able to count on them

27. Who are your favorite writers?

• Lao Tzu

28. Who is your hero of fiction?

• Kieu Phong

29. Which historical figure do you most identify with?

• I don’t know much about historical figures to identify myself with

30. Who are your heroes in real life?

• my parents, my brother, my dog, and my boyfriend

31. What are your favorite names?

• of those I hold dear to my heart.

32. What is it that you most dislike?

• Fakes and the alikes

33. What is your greatest regret?

• times that I was not myself

34. How would you like to die?

• loved and be loved.

35. What is your motto?

• Love Life.  Love Love!

(source Vanity Fair)

The Infamous Proust Questionnaire

In the back pages of Vanity Fair each month, readers find The Proust Questionnaire, a series of questions posed to famous subjects about their lives, thoughts, values and experience. A regular reference to Proust in such a major publication struck me as remarkable, and it was only until I’d read Andre Maurois’s Proust: Portrait of a Genius that I understood what this was all about.

The young Marcel was asked to fill out questionnaires at two social events: one when he was 13, another when he was 20. Proust did not invent this party game; he is simply the most extraordinary person to respond to them. At the birthday party of Antoinette Felix-Faure, the 13-year-old Marcel was asked to answer the following questions in the birthday book, and here’s what he said:

• What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
  To be separated from Mama
• Where would you like to live?
  In the country of the Ideal, or, rather, of my ideal
• What is your idea of earthly happiness?
  To live in contact with those I love, with the beauties of nature, with a quantity of books and music, and to have, within easy distance, a French theater
• To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
  To a life deprived of the works of genius
• Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
  Those of romance and poetry, those who are the expression of an ideal rather than an imitation of the real
• Who are your favorite characters in history?
  A mixture of Socrates, Pericles, Mahomet, Pliny the Younger and Augustin Thierry
• Who are your favorite heroines in real life?
  A woman of genius leading an ordinary life
• Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
  Those who are more than women without ceasing to be womanly; everything that is tender, poetic, pure and in every way beautiful
• Your favorite painter?
  Meissonier
• Your favorite musician?
  Mozart
• The quality you most admire in a man?
  Intelligence, moral sense
• The quality you most admire in a woman?
  Gentleness, naturalness, intelligence
• Your favorite virtue?
  All virtues that are not limited to a sect: the universal virtues
• Your favorite occupation?
  Reading, dreaming, and writing verse
• Who would you have liked to be?
  Since the question does not arise, I prefer not to answer it. All the same, I should very much have liked to be Pliny the Younger.

This questionnaire tells us much about two things, the character of petiit Marcel, and the amusement of the young in the Belle Epoque. We see Marcel as a sweet and dreamy Mama’s boy, brainy, aesthetic, a young citizen of the world with much sympathy for the feminine. What he sees in Pliny the Younger, famous only for speaking and writing letters, is hard to grasp.

What is fascinating about this questionnaire is that it was considered so great an amusement to very young people in Proust’s time. It is hard to imagine a party of 13-year-olds in these times being quizzed about their favorite virtues, painters or characters of fiction and history. If the questionnaire were not to smack of exam, it would have to ask “what’s your favorite TV show?” or “what’s your favorite band?”

Seven years after the first questionnaire, Proust was asked, at another social event, to fill out another; the questions are much the same, but the answers somewhat different, indicative of his traits at 20:

• Your most marked characteristic?
  A craving to be loved, or, to be more precise, to be caressed and spoiled rather than to be admired
• The quality you most like in a man?
  Feminine charm
• The quality you most like in a woman?
  A man’s virtues, and frankness in friendship
• What do you most value in your friends?
  Tenderness - provided they possess a physical charm which makes their tenderness worth having
• What is your principle defect?
  Lack of understanding; weakness of will
• What is your favorite occupation?
  Loving
• What is your dream of happiness?
  Not, I fear, a very elevated one. I really haven’t the courage to say what it is, and if I did I should probably destroy it by the mere fact of putting it into words.
• What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?
  Never to have known my mother or my grandmother
• What would you like to be?
  Myself - as those whom I admire would like me to be
• In what country would you like to live?
  One where certain things that I want would be realized - and where feelings of tenderness would always be reciprocated. [Proust’s underlining]
• What is your favorite color?
  Beauty lies not in colors but in thier harmony
• What is your favorite flower?
  Hers - but apart from that, all
• What is your favorite bird?
  The swallow
• Who are your favorite prose writers?
  At the moment, Anatole France and Pierre Loti
• Who are your favoite poets?
  Baudelaire and Alfred de Vigny
• Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
  Hamlet
• Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
  Phedre (crossed out) Berenice
• Who are your favorite composers?
  Beethoven, Wagner, Shuhmann
• Who are your favorite painters?
  Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt
• Who are your heroes in real life?
  Monsieur Darlu, Monsieur Boutroux (professors)
• Who are your favorite heroines of history?
  Cleopatra
• What are your favorite names?
  I only have one at a time
• What is it you most dislike?
  My own worst qualities
• What historical figures do you most despise?
  I am not sufficiently educated to say
• What event in military history do you most admire?
  My own enlistment as a volunteer!
• What reform do you most admire?
  (no response)
• What natural gift would you most like to possess?
  Will power and irresistible charm
• How would you like to die?
  A better man than I am, and much beloved
• What is your present state of mind?
  Annoyance at having to think about myself in order to answer these questions
• To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
  Those that I understand
• What is your motto?
  I prefer not to say, for fear it might bring me bad luck.

(source Chick.net)

Nữa niềm riêng

Đêm giao thừa . Pháo nổ hòa lẫn vào tiếng hò reo . Năm mới bắt đầu . Nụ cười hé nở . Vẫn thủy chung là một . Hai năm rưỡi . “Em ơi, chúc mừng năm mới ”

***

1. Tháng Giêng. Giá lạnh. Cơn gió thổi thoáng qua làm tâm hồn xao xuyến . Những cảm súc riêng tư từ lâu đã lắng động, bổng dưng thầm ke kẽ gọi tên nhau. Nữa hồn đã mất trước kia nay đã tìm thấy trong những dấu chân miệt mài, mong mõi, chờ đợi . Niềm vui nhỏ nhỏ đọng lại như những hạt nắng hôn nhẹ lên màng sương mai, thấm dần vào làn hơi thở .

Như một luồn hào quang tỏa sáng khắp nơi, chợt bừng tỉnh giấc: Ta đã biết yêu.

2. Những cảm nghĩ sâu xa không còn nữa . Nó như đã đánh lạc mất bản thân mình tự lúc nào . Rơi vào khoảng không trống rỗng, nó cảm thấy bơ vơ nhưng tự tại . Cả thế giới chìm vào trong ánh sáng mù mịt nghẹt thở . Những âm vang khẽ động như hồi chuông đánh bừng tỉnh giấc . Thì ra đời là thế . Khẳng định vẫn mãi là không . Nó sựt tỉnh giấc . Tư tưởng vẫn còn động lại . Ấm áp. Một ngày nữa đang lặng lẽ trôi qua .

3. Tần tảo nữa đời người, nó thầm mơ tưởng những ngày được an vui như thời thơ ấu . Nhiều lúc nhìn ra ngoài khung cửa sổ, nó cảm thấy mình miên man như đang chìm vào một cơn sốt nặng . Lắm lúc, nó khẽ đảo mắt nhìn những người xung quanh. Họ như điên cuồn mê dại trong trí tưởng tượng riêng của chính bản thân mình . Những căn bịnh ung thư mà mẹ nó đã thì thầm bên tai khi nó còn nhỏ : Tiền, Tình, Ghanh tỵ , Tò mò

Nó nhìn những người chung quanh đang bị những cơn bịnh làm miệt mài thân sát . Khẽ thở dài, buông lõng . Nó tự hỏi bản thân: Bịnh là cho mình hay do đời tạo nên ?