1. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
PROUST (aged 13): To be separated from Mama.
MOMUS: To lose any sense of one's own value, and the world's.
2. Where would you like to live?
PROUST (aged 13): In the country of the Ideal, or, rather, of my ideal.
MOMUS: Tokyo.
3. What is your idea of earthly happiness?
PROUST (aged 13): To live in contact with those I love, with the beauties of nature, with a quantity of books and music, and to have, within easy distance, a French theater.
MOMUS: Having my back scratched. Possibly in a house designed for me by Atelier Bow Wow, but it's not crucial.
4. To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
PROUST (aged 13): To a life deprived of the works of genius.
MOMUS: Sartorial eccentricity, sexual perversity, popinjay pretension and the generous side of exoticization.
5. Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
PROUST (aged 13): Those of romance and poetry, those who are the expression of an ideal rather than an imitation of the real.
MOMUS: Sherlock Holmes, Tintin, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Mr Palomar, Marco Polo.
6. Who are your favorite characters in history?
PROUST (aged 13): A mixture of Socrates, Pericles, Mahomet, Pliny the Younger and Augustin Thierry.
MOMUS: Siddhartha Gotama, Sei Shonagon and Epicurus.
7. Who are your favorite heroines in real life?
PROUST (aged 13): A woman of genius leading an ordinary life.
MOMUS: Japanese art and design students.
8. Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
PROUST (aged 13): Those who are more than women without ceasing to be womanly; everything that is tender, poetic, pure and in every way beautiful.
MOMUS: The Bilitis of Pierre Louÿs and the Juliette of Shakespeare.
9. Your favorite painter?
PROUST (aged 13): Meissonier.
MOMUS: Paul Klee.
10. Your favorite musician?
PROUST (aged 13): Mozart.
MOMUS: John Cage.
11. The quality you most admire in a man?
PROUST (aged 13): Intelligence, moral sense.
MOMUS: Compassionate thoughtfulness.
12. The quality you most admire in a woman?
PROUST (aged 13): Gentleness, naturalness, intelligence.
MOMUS: Refined playfulness.
13. Your favorite virtue?
PROUST (aged 13): All virtues that are not limited to a sect: the universal virtues.
MOMUS: Remaining interested in things. I mean the right things, not sweepstakes sudoku.
14. Your favorite occupation?
PROUST (aged 13): Reading, dreaming, and writing verse.
MOMUS: Bathing in a Japanese hot spring.
15. Who would you have liked to be?
PROUST (aged 13): Since the question does not arise, I prefer not to answer it. All the same, I should very much have liked to be Pliny the Younger.
MOMUS: If I'm allowed to be a god, then Amaterasu, the Japanese sun goddess. If I have to be a man, Li Po. But I can think of few lives better than the one I've had as Momus.
