The sadness that underlies all the best accounts of the interactions of Men with elves, fairies and the like; is that the enchantment of Faery is only partly available to Men - either for a finite visit or by incomplete inklings.
Faery seems greatly desirable and greatly satisfying; in that its sense of beauty and pervasive life and consciousness is so powerful as to satisfy our cravings.
Yet such satisfaction is always cut short, or diluted by a counter-current of self-consciousness and the ultimate inescapability of death.
If Only, Men feel, we could live forever is such a situation of enchantment - that would be enough! Life might be complete. Our existential dissatisfaction would at last be stilled.
It is this brevity and partiality that mislead; because Men never get to see the limitations of Faery life, the different intrinsic sadness of existence for even "immortal" elves or faeries dwelling in paradise.
We clutch and cling to the hope of Faery enchantment - until the "if only" becomes an always increasing obsession.
This is one significance of JRR Tolkien's story of Numenor; in which the more closely that Men attain to the enchanted life of elves, the more deluded they become concerning its ultimate sufficiency.
The problem begins as a close friendship with the Eldar tinged by an envy of elves immortality - which was the only substantive difference between Numenorean men and the Eldar.
But as the delusion gets a grip that elven immortality will complete Men's happiness; Numenorean Men become hostile to elves; thereby avoiding the kind of personal association that might disillusion them about the imagined "guaranteed bliss" of life as an elf.
Tolkien was (it seems) strongly aware both of the impossibility of a wholly (or even mostly) enchanted life for mortal Men; and also aware that even if it were possible to live always in Faery, this would not provide a full answer to our existential yearning.
This is because the happiness of immortal elves becomes overwhelmed by the nature and effects of continual living in a world where there is death and evil. This means that loss is both inevitable and cumulative; and the memory of times before loss is an increasing burden.
To me, it seems that elven bliss could only be complete if elves lived in the here-and-now of a paradise but without memory - so that losses would be forgotten. This would mean that awareness, memory, intelligence would all need to be reduced to a bare minimum - if not deleted; and elves would decline to a lower, animal-like or plant-like, state of consciousness.
For Tolkien; there were other possibilities for Men; and these included a escape of the spirit to a world without time or change; or else (or perhaps as well as) the life of spirits reborn into this earth but (somehow) purged of death and evil.
(For me; the reason why mortal life is only partly enchanted is ultimately because mortal life is a transitional stage between life as pre-mortal spirits, and the possibility of a future of resurrected eternal life in the new creation that is Heaven.)
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