Henry Louis Gates Jr.: What is your greatest fear?

The question

Originally asked

Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire

The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here

That we will be remembered as a people who locked our fellow citizens in cages and who believe that some people are rich and some people are poor because “it’s their nature” and that racism and poverty are inevitable parts of the order of things; that M.L.K. and Bobby Kennedy died in vain; and that no one any longer believes what M.L.K. said in his Nobel Prize address in Oslo: “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”

Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, March 2019 source ↗

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Fay Ripley English actress, television presenter, cookbook author

Spiders, needles, blood, pain and breaking wind in public.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 26 November 2022 source ↗

Garrison Keillor

That this is all there is, and there is no more.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, September 2009 source ↗

A.J. Jacobs Journalist and author of The Year of Living Biblically

Saying something dumb on Twitter and getting yelled at by thousands of strangers. Also, catastrophic climate change.

Recorded Naomi Imatome-Yun, Blue Zones interview, November 2018 source ↗

Midge Ure

Apathy, either from an audience, the people around me or myself.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 2 September 2023 source ↗

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Question What is your idea of perfect happiness? Identity & self

Late one Sunday afternoon, my three-year-old granddaughter, out of the blue, took my hand and said she wanted to whisper something to me. Could we go for a ride around the block before we all sat down for dinner? Just the two of us? Holding hands as we walked to and from the car in the driveway: Bliss.

Recorded The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 28 March 2019 source ↗

Question When were you happiest? Time & hindsight

Well, I’m happiest on Martha’s Vineyard, between July 1 and Labor Day, riding my tricycle with Larry Bobo every afternoon and fishing with Buddy Vanderhoop. But I was happiest from my childhood through high school in Piedmont, West Virginia; it was magical. I was sorry when it was time to go off to college.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, March 2019 source ↗

Question Which living person do you most admire, and why? Values & belief

It’s a tie between Vernon Eulion Jordan Jr., Wole Soyinka, and Oprah Winfrey. All are fearless, all know themselves, all have examined themselves, and all are comfortable with what they have seen.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, March 2019 source ↗

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