The Things We Understand Too Late: Reading Natalia Ginzburg’s Caro Michele
I had barely begun Natalia Ginzburg’s Caro Michele when I found myself stopping.
Page five.
I read a sentence once, then again.
“But it is true that at a certain point in our lives, we dip our regrets into our morning coffee like biscuits.”
That was it.
No great declaration about aging. No explanation of regret, forgiveness, or the passing of time. Just a cup of coffee, some biscuits, and all the things we wish we had done differently.
I knew then that this was going to be one of those books.
Not necessarily a book that gives us answers, but one that quietly puts words around things we have known for years without knowing how to say them.
Natalia Ginzburg published Caro Michele in Italy in 1973. English-speaking readers may know it today as Happiness, as Such, the title of Minna Zallman Proctor’s 2019 translation. The novel is largely told through letters exchanged among members of a complicated Italian family, with Michele — son, brother, friend, possible father — at its elusive center.
And yet Michele is mostly absent.
He leaves Italy. Other people write to him, write about him, wonder about him, complain about him, worry about him, imagine him.
Perhaps that is one reason this book affected me so deeply.
It is a novel about family, but also about something more difficult: how much of another person's life can we ever really know, even when we love them?
The Strange Things That Grow With Age
Michele's mother writes:
“It is true that the more the years pass, the greater the resources of our patience become. They are the only resources we have that increase; all the others tend to dry up.”
I stopped there too.
We often talk about aging as an accumulation. We accumulate experience. Wisdom. Perspective. Knowledge.
Ginzburg offers something less comforting.
Perhaps we lose as much as we gain.
Energy changes. Possibilities narrow. Certain illusions disappear. People disappear. Time itself begins to feel different.
And what grows?
Patience.
Not wisdom. Not serenity. Not some magnificent understanding of life.
Patience.
The ability, perhaps, to remain beside what cannot be fixed.
It made me think again about those regrets dipped into morning coffee.
Ginzburg does not suggest that regret disappears. Quite the opposite. It becomes familiar. We wake up. We make coffee. The past is still the past.
And somehow we continue.
There is something unsentimental about that which I find deeply consoling.
When a Child Has a Life You Can No Longer See
Then I reached a passage that affected me differently.
Michele's mother writes to her son:
“I try to imagine your life in one place or another, but at the same time I feel that your life is different from the way I imagine it, and so my imagination grows increasingly distrustful and weary of weaving its arabesques over you.”
I am the mother of two adult sons.
And I know those arabesques.
When our children are small, so much of their existence happens in front of us. We know what they ate. We know where they slept. We know who upset them. We know what happened at school. We know what their faces looked like at breakfast.
Then they grow up.
They leave.
Their lives continue in rooms we have never entered, among people we may barely know, through ordinary days we do not witness.
And still, because we love them, we imagine.
We fill the spaces.
We picture the morning, the drive to work, the conversation, the apartment, the silence after an argument, the expression on their face when something goes wrong.
We weave our arabesques.
But Ginzburg's mother understands something painful: the life we imagine for someone is not the life they are actually living.
There is humility in recognizing this.
Love does not give us ownership of another person's interior world.
Not even motherhood does.
Perhaps one of the hardest transitions in loving an adult child is learning to say: I love you beyond measure, and there are parts of your life I cannot see.
A House in Order, a Heart in Disorder
At another point, Michele's mother asks him to explain her to his wife:
“Explain to your wife that I am someone who has her house in order and her heart in disorder. Explain to her what I am like, so that when she sees me she can compare my real image with your descriptions. It is one of the rare pleasures life offers us: comparing other people's descriptions with our fantasies, and then with reality.”
“A house in order and a heart in disorder.”
Ginzburg can do in nine words what another writer might spend three pages explaining.
I love the contradiction.
The visible life may be perfectly arranged while the invisible one is anything but.
But what interested me even more was what follows.
There is the person we are.
There is the person someone else describes.
And then there is the person imagined by whoever hears the description.
Eventually, if we meet, all three versions encounter one another.
How often have we experienced this?
Someone tells us about a friend, a sister, a husband, a colleague. Without realizing it, we begin constructing that person in our minds. Then one day we meet them and think:
Oh. So this is you.
Reality is never quite the same as the description. But neither is it the same as the person we invented.
Perhaps this is also what Ginzburg is doing with Michele.
Everyone talks about him.
Everyone remembers him.
Everyone constructs him.
And we readers construct him too.
But he remains somehow beyond our grasp.
Just as people do.
We Rarely Know We Are Happy While We Are Happy
There is one letter from Michele's mother that I found particularly painful.
She remembers a day they spent together:
“I remember that I felt a great happiness in getting angry and protesting with you. I knew that my protests would arouse in you a mixture of amusement and boredom. I think now that that was a happy day, but unfortunately it is rare to recognize happy moments while we are living them. We usually recognize them only from a distance. Happiness for me was protesting, and for you it was rummaging through my cupboards.”
How ordinary happiness can be.
A mother complaining.
A son rummaging through cupboards.
Nothing worth photographing. Nothing anyone would identify, while it was happening, as one of the important moments of a life.
And yet years later:
That was happiness.
How many days that we now remember tenderly once felt completely unremarkable?
How many people we would give anything to sit beside again once annoyed us simply by being in the room?
How many ordinary afternoons became precious only because they ended?
Perhaps happiness often fails to announce itself.
Sometimes it just looks like Tuesday.
But Ginzburg does not leave us with that comforting thought.
She makes it harder.
The mother continues:
“But I must also say that we wasted precious time that day. We could have sat down and questioned each other about essential things. We would probably have been less happy; perhaps we would even have been terribly unhappy. But now I would remember that day not as a vague happy day, but as a truthful and essential day for you and me, destined to illuminate who you are and who I am.”
And then comes what may be the saddest realization:
“We always exchanged words of an inferior nature, never clear and necessary words, but instead gray, good-natured, floating and useless words.”
This stopped me.
Because Ginzburg makes a distinction I had not thought about quite this way before.
Happiness and truth are not necessarily the same thing.
They might have sat down that day and talked honestly.
They might have asked each other the essential questions.
And they might have been miserable.
Instead they complained, rummaged through cupboards, exchanged ordinary words — and were happy.
But later, happiness is not quite enough.
The mother wishes they had known one another.
That may be one of the most painful questions in this novel:
How much time do we spend with the people we love without ever asking them the things that matter?
Not because we don't love them.
Perhaps sometimes precisely because we do.
The ordinary words are safer.
The Complicated Business of Knowing People
Then there is Mara.
Mara has a baby who may be Michele's. She moves from place to place, looking for somewhere to stay, entering other people's lives with all her confusion and need.
At one point she says:
“I feel sorry for the curly-haired woman, but at the same time I hate her. I have discovered that once you get to know people a little, you begin to feel sorry for them. That is why it is so pleasant to be with strangers: the moment when you feel sorry for them and hate them has not begun yet.”
I laughed when I read this.
And then I thought about it.
It is funny because it is cruel.
It is also funny because there is something uncomfortable in it that I recognize.
Strangers are easy.
We haven't yet learned their repetitions. Their weaknesses. Their neediness. Their vanities. Their wounds. Their habits that will eventually drive us mad.
We can still imagine them simply.
Knowing another human being complicates everything.
We can love someone and resent them.
Feel tenderness and irritation.
Want to help and want to run away.
Feel compassion and anger at exactly the same time.
Ginzburg does not tidy these contradictions up for us.
That may be one of the things I admire most about her.
She lets contradictory feelings remain contradictory.
Because that is often how we actually love.
The Part of Ourselves Where We Can Meet Another Person
And then, after Michele's death, Angelica writes to Mara.
It contains perhaps my favorite passage in the novel:
“We would like to take care of your child, so I think we will try to send you some money from time to time. Not that money will solve anything for you, since you are alone, adrift, wandering and foolish. But every one of us is adrift and foolish in some part of ourselves, and sometimes powerfully drawn to wander and breathe nothing but our own solitude. And so each of us can move into that part of ourselves in order to understand you.”
I have thought about this passage ever since.
Especially these words:
“in some part of ourselves.”
Angelica does not say, We are all the same.
We aren't.
She does not say, I know exactly how you feel.
She doesn't.
She says something far more generous.
There is a place inside me from which I can understand you.
I think this may be one of the most beautiful descriptions of empathy I have read.
We do not have to have lived another person's life in order to reach toward them.
Perhaps we have to search within ourselves for the place where our experiences touch.
You may be lost in a way I have never been lost.
But I know the part of myself that has felt lost.
You may have wanted to run away from things I would never leave.
But somewhere inside me lives a person who understands the desire to wander.
You may crave solitude differently from me.
But I know what it is to want, for a little while, to “breathe nothing but our own solitude.”
That last idea stayed with me.
Because I recognize that place.
I love my family. I love connection. I love the people who have filled my life.
And still, there is a part of me that sometimes wants to belong to no one for a little while.
To walk.
To read.
To write.
To think.
To sit quietly without having to solve anything for anybody.
Not because love has disappeared.
Because sometimes solitude is where we return to hear ourselves again.
The Words We Never Said
When I finished Caro Michele, I realized that all the passages I had marked were speaking to one another.
Regret.
Patience.
Children whose lives become unknowable to their parents.
The difference between who we are and who others imagine us to be.
Happy days we recognize only after they are gone.
Essential conversations we never had.
People we both pity and dislike.
The hidden part of ourselves where we can understand someone whose life looks nothing like ours.
They all seem to circle the same question:
How well can we ever know another human being?
And perhaps another:
How well do we know the life we are living while we are living it?
Ginzburg gives us no comforting answer.
That is precisely why I loved this book.
She does not tell us to appreciate every moment.
She does not tell us that everything happens for a reason.
She does not turn regret into a lesson or loss into personal growth.
Sometimes we simply discover, years later, that an ordinary day was a happy one.
Sometimes the conversation we should have had never happened.
Sometimes the person we loved had an entire interior life we could not reach.
Sometimes our hearts remain in disorder even when the house is perfectly clean.
And eventually, perhaps, we become patient enough to live beside all of this.
We dip our regrets into our morning coffee like biscuits.
And another day begins.
A Question to Carry With You
Is there an ordinary moment in your life that you did not recognize as happiness until it was already gone?
And perhaps a harder question:
Is there someone still in your life with whom you have been exchanging kind, gray, floating words when what you really want to say is something clear and necessary?
Note: I read Natalia Ginzburg’s novel in the original Italian, Caro Michele. The passages quoted in this essay have been translated from my Italian edition for this reflection and are not quotations from the published English translation. The novel is currently available in English as Happiness, as Such, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor.