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In her essay “Human Relations,” Natalia Ginzburg describes, in the first-person plural, our life trajectory—being fixated, as little children, on the “dark and mysterious” world of adults, then losing interest in adults, groveling to the cool kid, dropping her for someone more likeminded, dropping her for a bohemian faux-poor lifestyle, becoming actually poor, finding the right person but not realizing that he is the right person until we’ve been with him for years, being so wrapped up in our children we forget about our vocation. The essay ends—though “the story of human relationship never ceases”—with us being looked at stony-eyed by our own teenagers. But “by now we know how the long chain of human relationships unwinds its long necessary parabola, and … we know all the long road we have to travel down in order to arrive at the point where we have a little compassion.” It is not simple to become simple.
