"THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY" by Thornton Wilder

I saw the movie of this story when I was a kid and yet I can still see the swaying cable bridge breaking loose and people falling into the canyon below. Funny the things that memory holds onto. Wilder won the Pulitzer for this story of the local monk's persistent quest to find out why God allowed those particular five people to be on that bridge when it collapsed that day in Peru. The author has each of the five victims move into the first person to narrate their life stories up until the point of their deaths. And their lives are interesting. In the beginning of the last chapter we begin to understand Brother Juniper's alarming obsession with fate. He goes so far as to develop a chart to diagram the value of people's souls which he graded based on their goodness, religiousness and other qualities. As he saw the enormity and uselessness of the chart he unconsciously realized a great chasm between faith and fact. Unfortunately for him, he comes to the attention of the Inquisition
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A new bridge of stone is build to replace the old one. The town returns to normal. And the author ties the bridge of San Luis Rey with the bridge of human love in this way: "But soon we shall die ... and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough... 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."

Thornton Wilder was born in 1897. He wrote many novels, plays and screenplays, but the critics of his time considered this his masterpiece. He died in 1975.