Al Franken
Senator and comedian
Surrounded by my great-great-grandchildren.
How would you like to die?
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
A fixed final question in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire, repeated verbatim across respondent pages.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I would like to die in good health, at an old age, in a house on a mountain that looks out over the ocean, dreaming about everyone and everything I have had the impossible good fortune to have loved. Maybe Ralph Stanley is singing “Angel Band.”
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 17 December 2013 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 44 →
Helena Bonham Carter
Actor
At the right time, and like my father—utterly without fear or pain, at home, with all whom I love. It was his last lesson as a parent to me.
John Mellencamp
Singer and songwriter
I need a long and lingering death to make sure that I have time to have a deathbed conversion.
Karl Ove Knausgård
Novelist
Self-combusting at a very late age.
More from T Bone Burnett
View profile →My happiest moment was being in the room when my daughter was born, and seeing her draw her first breath and turn from what looked like gray clay into the deepest, most vibrant, most psychedelic crimson. It was an unforgettable, unimaginable explosion of energy and potential—of promise and pure love.
Perfection is a second-rate idea. I would guess, however, that perfected happiness would be joy, the most intricate and mercurial of all sensations. The moment one recognizes joy, it flees. I’m not sure where Proust is going with this line of questioning, and I don’t want to be evasive, so I will say my idea of perfect happiness is the end of economics; we grow like flowers and fly like birds; the lion lays down with the lamb—a ridiculous idea.
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Also answered this
Rita Moreno, Audra McDonald, John Mellencamp, Hans Zimmer, Bonnie Raitt, Dolly Parton
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