ET Ask Home, a monthly questionnaire

With March guest Erin O'Halloran

Paid subscribers get two extra issues a month. One of those is ET Ask Home, inspired by Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire. This month’s guest is historian Erin O’Halloran, author of the new book East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World between the Wars.

Hi! Thanks for doing this. Please put down how you’d like to be identified here:

Dr. Erin M.B. O’Halloran / Erin

Is there a particular photo you'd like me to use? It doesn't have to be of you! It can be of, like, a dog.

The questions, which you should feel free to answer at whatever length you'd like, are:

What is a piece of writing (book, play, poem, etc) that you think of often?

Several things come to mind. I have a stanza from Pushkin’s 'To the Poet’ tattooed on my ribs. The first time I read it, at 18, I burst into tears.

Also from Pushkin, his analysis of Tatyana in Eugene Onegin felt a little too close to home in my early twenties. I still think of it whenever my heart-so-tender threatens to burst to a fiery blaze. I think this is Johnston's translation (from memory, forgive me):

Why is Tatyana guiltier-seeming?

Is it that she, poor simple-sweet

Believes in her elected dreaming

And has no knowledge of deceit?

That artless and without concealing

Her love obeys the laws of feeling

That she’s so trustful and imbued

By heaven with such unsubdued

Imagination—with such reason—

Such stubborn brain and vivid will

And heart so tender it can still

Burst to a fiery blaze in season?

Such heedless passion—as I live—

Is this then what we can’t forgive?

Finally, the section of Khalil Gebran’s The Prophet ‘On Work’, particularly these lines:

You have been told also that life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary.

And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,

And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,

And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,

And all work is empty save when there is love;

And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?