Sometimes, though, death comes from nowhere and takes the people around us unexpectedly.

It is the only fairness that the universe grants. All roads, after all, lead to the grave, and there are no exceptions. If the end comes naturally, at the end of a respectable sum of years, we can even temper our sadness. We can plant a tree with the acceptance we will never sit beneath its shade. Grandparents can enjoy their grandchildren without dwelling on the unlikelihood of seeing them fully grown. Just to make it a bit worse, we don’t know when the timer was set.ĭay to day, we can accept this, even ignore it. From the moment we are born, a clock starts ticking, and nothing we do will keep it from counting down to zero. We humans are a lot like automobiles, which start to lose value the moment you drive them off the lot. Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning…” But the love will have been enough all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. Granville Hicks's insightful comment about Wilder suggests an inveterate truth: 'As a craftsman he is second to none, and there are few who have looked deeper into the human heart.'

Tappan Wilder has written an engaging and thought-provoking afterword, which includes unpublished notes for the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, illuminating photographs, and other remarkable documentary material. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is now reissued in this handsome hardcover edition featuring a new foreword by Russell Banks. His study leads to his own death - and to the author's timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition. Brother Juniper seeks to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. 'On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.' With this celebrated sentence, Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world.īy chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy.

The bridge of luis rey