Italian author Natalia Ginzburg's remarkable essay "He and I" begins with the comma splice "He always feels hot, I always feel cold." We immediately know we are in for a study of contrasts, as in "Youth and Old Age," Aristotle's comparison between young and old men. But she gives us so much more in an impartial, intimate look at an enduring relationship in spite of a legion of personal differences. She ends the essay with this 117-word sentence:
If I remind him of that walk along the Via Nazionale he says he remembers it, but I know he is lying and that he remembers nothing; and I sometimes to ask myself if it was us, these two people, almost twenty years ago one the Via Nazionale, two people who conversed so politely, so urbanely, as the sun was setting; who chatted a little bit about everything perhaps and about nothing; two friends talking, two young intellectuals out for a walk; so young, so educated, so uninvolved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever as the sun set at the corner of the street.
Such a stunning sentence takes us along with this young couple on their walk two decades earlier than where they are now, observing the unpredictability of human attachments, of two people not walking away forever but bonding forever.
