What is your greatest fear?

It was desperate because of certain things, ingredients like my father being an alcoholic, my mother having too many babies in too short a time, no work available in Ireland, and even when my father did get a job he drank the wages. Then there was the harsh kind of schooling we had with school masters who ruled with a stick and then because of the overwhelming presence of the church, which imbued us with fear all the time. So it was fear, dampness, poverty, alcoholism, fear of the church, fear of the school masters, fear in general.

Losing my mind and not knowing it.

That we will drown in plastic waste.

Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.

Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things.

Losing another child. (I lost one of my sons to suicide when he was 19.)

Living with severe chronic pain, or forgetting the name of the person I’m interviewing.

Flipping my wig.

That the Proust Questionnaire will continue to be used by lazy, overworked journalists for another century or so (since you asked …).

He’s always been the family cook. He’s been feeding me since the day we met. Everything I know about Japanese food I know because of him. So now that’s another pleasure gone, perhaps the greatest. I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that is what they will remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones. What it will do to Shin I can’t bear to contemplate.

Very large bugs.

I know we all have to die, but when my time comes, I’d rather it not be because a goose flew into the engine of a plane I’m on.

Having a stroke.

The loss of a child.

A world destroyed by science-denying mediocrity.

Running out of Molecule cologne.

Premature demise.

I have a mild fear of not being appreciative enough for the luck that has come my way. That’s about it.

My wife dying. I wouldn’t know how to go on.

Having a great fear.