My Years With Proust - Day 437

The conversation of a woman one loves in like the ground above a dangerous subterranean stretch of water; one sense constantly beneath the words the presence, the penetrating chill of an invisible pool; one perceives here and there its treacherous percolation, but the water itself remains hidden.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1050

Yes, it may be a brief sentence (at least by Proustian standards), but this is one of my favorite sections from the entirety of Remembrance of Things Past.  It's in the middle of a longer passage where Marcel is, per usual, fretting over Albertine, in this case brought on by something she said.  For years I've joked that I'm essentially Mecca for funny, intelligent, challenging women, and that they seem required to make a pilgrimage to my presence.  Of course, to be honest, that means that they also serve as Mecca for me, and I must have some built-in qibla that directs me their way.  It can't simply be because they're funny and intelligent, although I quickly melt around intelligent women with a sense of humor (especially if it has a definite edge).  So, that does it mean that I'm drawn to the challenging (read: difficult) portion of their emotional portfolio?  I've certainly dated women who were beautiful and funny and intelligent, but in the end it was the challenging ones that I ended up chasing.  Why?  I suppose it could be something as simple as our desire do the impossible (as Woody Allen says - and I'm paraphrasing - in Manhattan, "you think you're always the one who is going to make them sane.")  It works the other way of course, as a seemingly endless supply of otherwise intelligent women think that they're actually be the one who can make you into a good person.  If we really wanted to get dark I guess I could theorize that none of us really wants to be happy anyway, maybe because we think that we don't deserve happiness.  In the end, I'm coming back to one of my favorite theories: it's all part of our desire to exoticize our lives.  There's nothing particularly interesting about living a happy humdrum life, although, obviously, it's all any of us should ever want anyway.