Albertine's friends had gone away for some time. I was anxious to provide her with distractions. Even supposing that she might have found some happiness in spending the afternoon with no company but my own, at Balbec, I knew that such happiness is never complete and that Albertine, being still at the age (which some people never outgrow) when one has not yet discovered that this imperfection resides in the person who experiences the happiness and not in the person who gives it, might have been tempted to trace the cause of her disappointment back to me.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 884
Why are we drawn, almost magnetically, to the perpetually sad? And why do we devote so much energy in the sysphean task of trying to make them happy? At a certain age we should discover, as Proust points out, that "this imperfection resides in the person who experiences the happiness and not in the person who gives it." And yet some of us never figure it out. Is it because we think that we're going to be the one to make them happy, and thus it's just vanity? Or maybe we mistake their unhappiness for some deeper intelligence and understanding, and thus we romanticize them and assign them a greater fascination. I've always joked that I have a fatal attraction to dark European actresses with a terrible secret, and I'm sure it's all part of the same mania.
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