Karuppacami Kelvittaal

The Proust Questionnaire, born in late 18th/19th-century European salons, wills its metempsychosis here at aformulationoftruth.com for the edification and enlightenment of a culture in dire straits. We may regard each question as a threshold (dvāra), each answer a seed for recognition (pratyabhijñā). Respond, then forget the questions and how you answered. Let time work its alchemy. And when you return to them, a former self awaits. Your self no longer because, like a stranger, some of those responses you could not fathom. And in rereading them, you recognize an aspect of our nature. Language is the means we have to suggest one Self toward a more perfected treatment of one another.

Each question opens a threshold; each answer plants a seed for recognition. Respond, then forget. Only to return to encounter a stranger who speaks in your name—words now opaque, with certainties foreign. This is not failure but structure: the subject is more often elsewhere, barred from itself by the language through which a cultural evolution speaks.

What we call 'self-knowledge' is retroactive, a fiction we construct in the return¹. Yet something—desire, ego—transmits along though the nonce. Language—insufficient though it seems with its slips of the tongue that betray truer depths—remains the only means we have to incline one speaking being toward another. Not to perfect understanding, for there exists nothing to perfect, but to the recognition that we are all, equally, subjects of this same habit speech.