Dear Neighbor,
I recently quit subscribing to Vanity Fair. After nearly 20 years, I'd grown tired of the same old format. Once captivating, the monthly crime story turned tedious (the banality of evil), revealing lurid details of the rich and famous portraying the old trope that money can't buy happiness, ironically interspersed with ads for Cartier and Louis Vuitton showing desperately (or desperate-to-be) happy people.
I no longer cared what the magazine deemed to be “Up” or “Down” in the world of trends, finally realizing that’s my decision to make. And the political scandals, once shocking, became as commonplace as teenage acne.
During all those years two issues grabbed me personally. One was a cover story on the actor Josh Hartnett — not because I’m a fan of his movies, but because Josh, who grew up in St. Paul, was a student of mine back in the early ’90s when I took a part-time gig teaching Spanish at Nativity School. The article did not mention that.
The other issue’s cover heralded the story of a prominent New York family’s divorce scandal. Oooh! I dated a member of that clan back in the ’80s — maybe I know some of the players. I sure did!
The story was all about my old beau, his ex-wife (from a powerhouse D.C. family), their children, their fights, the drugs, the guns, the nannies who took care of way more than the children, the weaponized money, the string of psych wards the beleaguered wife took refuge in, all filed under what I like to call “Billionaires Gone Wild,” proving once again that money can’t buy happiness. Or sanity.
He was such a nice guy, I recalled through my 20-something, awestruck girlgoggles. As I read the article in my 40s, tucked safely in Minneapolis, I realized I’d dodged a billion bullets.
The years rolled on, the issues rolled in, and the only thing I still looked forward to was “The Proust Questionnaire,” found on the final page — a series of provocative questions asked of and answered by some-body famous.
Marcel Proust, the French author, did not invent the eponymous questionnaire. It was a popular parlor game for the Victorian literary crowd (of which Proust was a member) known as “Confessions,” designed to reveal a person’s true nature — a sort of “Truth or Dare” (hold the Dare).
Vanity Fair took the premise of “Confessions,” tacked on Proust’s name, I suppose for credence, and ran with it.
Each month celebrities are hit with 35 provocative and rapid-fire questions ranging from “When and where were you happiest?” to “How would you like to die?” The questions vary somewhat from month to month, but several are constants.
My favorite question, because it’s actually hard and requires deep thought, is “Which trait do you most admire in others?” It’s hard because there are many possible answers.
I posed this question to my book club the other night, and the quick answers were “kindness,” “compassion,” “generosity,” and others similar.
Melody, a thoughtful, gracious member, first said “kindness,” but struggled, adding that kindness is easy, and the most admired trait should be something more difficult to achieve, like a great sense of humor — a bigger answer, one that would encompass all the answers already tossed out. She’s right. Melody is one of the kindest people I’ve ever known, but she’s so much more than kind.
I said that every one of their answers I’d come up with, too, but given the advantage of years of pondering this particular question, I’d had time to think, and whenever I’d hit on one answer, I’d find myself thinking, like Melody, close, but no cigar. Finally, it came to me — the overarching term that captures compassion, kindness, humility, grit, intelligence — the lot:
Curiosity
Curiosity is a form of love. You can’t love something or someone without wanting to know more (and more, and more). Love begets kindness, compassion, generosity, all good things. Whether the object of curiosity is a person, a pet, an area of study, one keeps going, longing to know and understand more.
This leads to the other side of the “best trait” question: What trait do you most deplore in others? This was an easy one for my book club friends (and for me): Cruelty.
Cruelty
Snakes who inflict pain on others and don’t care how it impacts them comprise a particularly low breed. In the big leagues we have Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin — these guys are obvious. But cruelty abounds and surrounds us.
Catfish, traffickers, online scammers, shady car dealers and unscrupulous construction companies — anyone who knowingly screws over someone and feels glee in doing so engages willingly in cruelty.
On the more intimate scale we find gossips — those catty folks who poke around others’ lives, not out of curiosity (love) but to find dirt, vulnerabilities, misfortunes, and spread them around like so much mold, never realizing that their perceived, yet never attained, power is founded in nastiness.
What do you most admire and deplore in others?
— Dorothy
Dorothy Richmond writes for the Hill & Lake Press. She lives in Cedar-Isles-Dean.
