The question
What does happiness look like for you when life is going well?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
Verbatim recurring item in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire; two publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
A perfect flight to a perfect landing … with witnesses.
The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 1 December 2010 source ↗
“Perfect happiness!”—waking in the morning to a clear & benevolent-seeming sky, a view from a window of a beautiful (if overgrown) garden, a cat purring. The excitement of rewriting the previous day’s work, & continuing on from that point energized & hopeful. For a writer, “happiness” isn’t likely to ever be “perfect”—but it is likely to be bound up with the work-in-progress. First drafts tend to be frustrating, exhausting—subsequent drafts sometimes move swiftly, even miraculously. For most adults, “Perfect is the enemy of good”—we learn to appreciate whatever measure of happiness we have, however modest.
To be wildly, desperately, carelessly, nakedly in love, of course. Crazy, obsessive love: brooding, baying at the moon, writing daily missives to the adored. Who wouldn’t want this? Even though the crash is painful.
Finally, a happy marriage, of now 39 years!
A plate of fettuccine ragù with my kids.
Passive aggression.
Their willingness to have me as a friend.
Something happening to one of my children.
Procrastination.
John Lithgow, Kazuo Ishiguro, Liza Minnelli, Catherine O’Hara, Tom Ford, Derek Jeter
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