Proust Questionnaire: Anton's answers

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On Sat, 26 Jul 14 14:49:27 UTC Anton (52) answered the Proust Questionnaire (click on a question to read other answers):

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?: To live without hope.
Where would you like to live?: In a place where human rights are passionately championed and justice is seen to be done
What is your idea of earthly happiness?: To live in a place of beauty and respect for nature and life in general, where there is sharing and enough for everyone.
To what faults do you feel most indulgent?: I pontificate a lot more than I actually physically move.
Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?: Prince Myshkin, Atticus Finch, The Cat in the Hat.
Who are your favorite characters in history?: Margaret Mead, Walter Benjamin, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Thom Paine, Steve Biko, Galactia ...
Who are your favorite heroines in real life?: Those who abjure the heroics for quietly making things better (more sustainable and fair), bit by bit, step by step.
Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?: Antoinette from 'The Wide Sargossa Sea'; Anna Wulf from 'The Golden Notebook'; Eppie from 'Silas Marner'; Nina from 'The Seagull'; Sonya from 'Crime and Punishment'.
Your favorite painter?: Rembrandt today, perhaps Caravaggio tomorrow.
Your favorite musician?: It has to be Bach.
The quality you most admire in a man?: modesty, compassion.
The quality you most admire in a woman?: humour, lack of malice.
Your favorite virtue?: the desire to become a better human.
Your favorite occupation?: Creating as part of a shared experience.
Who would you have liked to be?: more understanding, more able to communicate more effectively my innermost thinking.
Your most marked characteristic?: A propensity to fret.
What do you most value in your friends?: Good humour - levity - and an ability to forgive me.
What is your principle defect?: too easily discouraged and thwarted in my dreams.
What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?: The inability to have understood - or been understood - by one other.
What would you like to be?: A survivor who thrives and blossoms in adversity and success.
What is your favorite color?: A spectrum of blues and greens.
What is your favorite flower?: The Strelitzia - unbowed and enduring.
What is your favorite bird?: The golden eagle.
Who are your favorite prose writers?: Grahame Greene, Doris Lessing, James Baldwin, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Jane Bowles, Capote, Philip Roth - there are so many!
Who are your favorite poets?: TS Eliot; Walt Whitman; John Keats, Auden, Gibran.
Who are your heroes in real life?: Thuli Madonsela, Nikolai Alekseev, Mehdi Karroubi - and many brave humans whose names I don't know.
Who are your favorite heroines of history?: Eleanor Roosevelt; Queen Esther and the Queen of Sheba.
What are your favorite names?: Currently, I'm rather taken with Peace.
What is it you most dislike?: testosterone-fueled power-mongering; unswerving, bigoted dogma; murder.
What historical figures do you most despise?: Adolf H still at number 1, but his many imitators are following closely behind.
What event in military history do you most admire?: The Dunkirk evacuation, when military and civilian energy combined to save Allied soldiers from near-certain death.
What natural gift would you most like to possess?: An ability to always rise above the fray to the sanctuary of my Higher Self.
How would you like to die?: Without pain, without regret ...
What is your present state of mind?: Immense sorrow at my fellow species - and hope of better things to come.
What is your motto?: To coin Sweet Charity's: "To live hopefully ever after".

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