“the bridge is love”
Not that I am obsessive or the least bit anal retentive… but I try to keep a list, among other lists, of the books that I’ve read each year. It is my way of tracking where I have been, literarily (?) speaking; it makes me stretch in different directions when I find I am reading in one vein exclusively (Agatha Christie) or have fallen into a rut of easy reading and need to give the little grey cells a more strenuous workout (couldn’t help myself).
I try to read works that are beautifully written and therefore essential (to my way of thinking) or are either informational/educational in some area of interest; and then there are fast reads for enjoyment to be mixed in with the real sloggers; and the, usually slogger, thought-provoking non fiction, and then there is serious fiction not in the gratuitous commercial sense with the requisite blood, sex, more blood (ok, I admit I read the Twilight series) or just authors that make me chuckle or otherwise think and I cannot wait for their next work: To Kill A Mockingbird, The ABC Murders, Clinical and Diagnostic Interviewing, The Great Gatsby, Murder On The Orient Express, Defiant Joy: Biography of G K Chesterton, Whose Body Is It, Writing Down The Bones, Change Your Brain Change Your Life, A Room With A View, and A Walk In The Woods … in that order (painful to admit but true, can check my, um, list).
Bill Bryson will make me laugh out loud. Harper Lee strikes me in the heart then the gut then the heart (every time; she wrote only one book and I have reread that book yearly for … a number of years). I am resigned however to reading the letters and speeches of Flannery O’Connor because her fiction remains too awfully deep for my mind (it is out of my depth and therefore awful … but she was a fascinating woman, fiercely gifted and so I keep on trying – there is real guilt that I just am repelled by her stories, however with Walker Percy I draw a hard-line – there is no way and happily no guilt even though I do not doubt he is as great as he said to be). Agatha Christie: where did she come up with these characters? And what about the sheer volume of her writing? Sick, as one college kid I know would say and I must agree. Sick.
That same college kid drew my attention to a book that I should have read eons ago (picking up a guilt theme here): The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. So I read Luis Rey this summer, fiction for grown ups (sorry Peter Mayle, but I love your Year In Provence). And, honestly, I am still thinking it over ( Wilder not Mayle). I detest wordy writers and I seem too dim for deep abstraction or symbolism … call me concrete :) when it comes to fiction which explains my Ernest Hemingway “phase”: lean spare writing of the world around him worked into a tense honest story. For this reader Hemingway writes a poetic prose that gives the reader a visceral experience. No excess but nothing left out. Love it. Unfortunately once I read more about his life, his themes, his wives, it took the shine off of his work for this reader. ( but every now and then I return to The Big Two- Hearted River and just, well, love it.)
But, back to Thornton Wilder and the reason for this post. Yes, I am still mulling the book, but I can fudge a lot when there is poetry in the words – with good poetry, truth is always found. So let me share the final line to this Pulitzer Prize winning book that is listed in the top 100 books of the 20th century:
“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
Good grief. Sorry, but you pretty much have to love this line.
I have decided to be judicious in my exploration of Mr. Wilder as a person, because I so love this line.
PS: and I didn’t even mention Jules Verne ………..
"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night. "
edna st.vincent millay
"May priests commit themselves, with prayer and good works, to obtaining from Christ the Eternal High Priest, the grace to shine with Faith, Hope, Charity and the other virtues, and show by their way of life, but also with their external conduct, that they are dedicated without reserve to the spiritual good of the people something that the Church has always had at heart."
shakespeare & company 