“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” (ht MS)
If you’re looking for some good summer reading, Wilder’s Pulitzer-winning The Bridge of San Luis Rey can’t be beat. Unless you count his Theophilus North, that is…
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One response to “From Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey”
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I totally agree. Wilder is one of the finest American novelists. Up there with Twain and Hawthorne. I knew about his plays early on, but only discovered his fiction about ten years ago. He changed my own writing forever. Gave me the courage to try omniscient narration and authorial intrusion, and taught me how to create a sense of the epic in under 150,000 words.