The Bridge

And where it leads

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

One of the more beautiful little novels ever written, Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey invites us to consider the lives of others. Its setting is foreign and alien, but it is not wholly alien. The people are known to us as types, even if they are not known to us by name. Those who live there, in this place, crossing the bridge multiple times daily, they do not think of fate and their destinies. But fate is ever thinking of them.

As with Our Town, another of Wilder’s works, a play so moving it is hard to watch, hard to hear on the radio, hard to read, without tears, the author wants us to think of the people who are around us on the pavements, who are about us in restaurants, who might annoy us in lines or queues, who might by somewhat petulant customers of ours, or rude without meaning harm to our children. He wants us to remember them: that we are joined by invisible threads, that chance governs our lives in ways it is painful to think of, and that we do not know who will be fortunate and who will not be. We never know.

I’ll talk a little around the subject of this novel but I would like you the reader to imagine something if you would. These characters are pure confection, many of them made up by me. It is up to you to determine whether they are real, whether they ever lived. But imagine their lives. Imagine what they hope and fear. Imagine them really and truly, as though you knew them. They are real. They are real. Repeat it to yourself. These are real people who live around me. They have lives and they have fates. They are real, they are real, they are real.

You are an orphan boy. Your parents left you and they left you with nothing. You have a brother. You care for him dearly. You believe – quite falsely – that he is more vulnerable than you are. You do all you can in a bid to give him life. The life you have not had to date. The life you believe he does so dearly deserve. He thinks the same of you – and yet you will never know it.

You are a woman alone, not a beauty, nor rich any longer. Your clothes, they invite ridicule and sometimes pity. You cry, you cry terribly sadly, because your daughter is gone. She has left you and lives in another place across the great ocean. She is a single letter, taken by a great sailing vessel, away, and yet you cannot reach her. You write letters and she does not respond. She is a letter away but you cannot reach out and touch her.

You are a beautiful actress marred now by the scars inflicted by a cruel illness. On the stage you are funny. The men in the audience admire your wit and your remarks. But you fear for the future, the fear when your make-up can no longer hide your scars not the signs of the advancing years. You fear very much for the future.

You are a rich man. Life has in its way been good to you. You have some influence; you have some style. You have arrived at prosperous middle age. You try to do good but the weight of your reputation. It holds you down. The weight of what people expect of you, it holds you down.

You are a poor girl without a good home. What once you had, now it is that very thing you lack. Who loves you, you think? Who loves you? And you travel to find some place to live. It is among the sisters of a nunnery that you find a place where it is possible for you to live as you wish. The sisters are kind to you. You begin again to hope.

And the day is an ordinary one. And the city moves as it always does. The day is an ordinary one. And then what was destined to happen occurs, and some lives end, and the world without pausing for a moment continues to turn.