Often when I reflect on the arrival of Covid-19 on our shores, my mind turns to the last cataclysmic tragedy which gripped the consciousness of America: the heartbreaking events of September 11, 2000. As happened then, the pandemic has left us once again seeking answers to profound and ultimately unfathomable questions about the nature of life and death as well as about the eternal relationship between love and grief.
I was born in New York City and grew up a short distance from Manhattan, so my grief for those who had died in the Twin Towers was magnified, like that of most New Yorkers, by the many times I’d seen the World Trade Center and visited the area around it. That said, I made a point of watching the televised coverage of the memorials for those that had died in the towers as well as for the first responders who came to help. At one of these memorial services, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a brief tribute to those of his fellow countrymen who perished that awful day. In his remarks, Blair quoted these words of American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder from his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them…. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love. The only survival, the only meaning.
Though it had been at least thirty years since I’d read Wilder’s novel in high school, Blair’s reference reminded me how deeply moved I had been by this enigmatic and poignant tale. This novel begins with the sudden collapse of a famous, massive rope bridge outside of Lima, Peru, in 1714. Its plot focuses on the lives of the five people who were killed when the bridge collapsed, lives recounted by a Franciscan monk named Brother Juniper. This monk, who had been but few minutes away from crossing the bridge himself, was, not surprisingly, horrified by the catastrophe he had narrowly averted.
In describing this disaster, Wilder observes how deceptively tenuous the solid texture of our daily landscape can be. “The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever,” he writes, adding “it was unthinkable that it should break.” He continues say “the moment a Peruvian heard of the accident he made a mental calculation as to how recently he had crossed by it and how soon he had intended crossing by it again.”
Equally compelling is the novel’s grasp of the spiritual stock-taking that follows large-scale disasters, manmade or otherwise. The story’s narrator tells us that in the aftermath of the bridge’s collapse, “there was great searching of hearts in the beautiful city of Lima.”
A child of the Enlightenment, Brother Juniper – the monk who had observed the collapse — considered himself a man of science as well religion and he determined to prove, using the methods of science, that these five deaths were somehow part of God’s plan, that there was some meaningful answer to the question of why these five had perished that day. In doing so, Juniper confronts the central spiritual question events like the collapse of the Lima bridge or the destruction of the World Trade Center or the Covid pandemic seem to ask of us. “Either we live by accident and die by accident,” he observes, or “we live by plan and die by plan.”
Juniper begins researching the lives of the bridge’s five victims, hoping to puzzle out the mystery of why these people—and only these people—were singled out for such a dramatic demise. In the end, Brother Juniper’s quest to find meaning in these five deaths using scientific observation proves inconclusive. Moreover, for even suggesting that faith in the divine order needed scientific proof, the friar is condemned by the Inquisition and burned at the stake.
What makes The Bridge of San Luis Rey so haunting is the fact that the novel seeks neither to support or reject Brother Juniper’s research. Instead, it focuses on the love – the imperfect, but profoundly human love — each of these five shared with others. Equally important is the novel’s observation that the lives which had been touched by the victims turned the survivors’ grief into increased and more unconditional love, charity, and concern for those still living.
Whether or not there is a God who created the universe, whether or not there is some sort of destiny guiding our lives, Wilder wisely concludes, we are unquestionably the caretakers of each other and the earth and it is that caring which gives meaning to our lives and our deaths. The last and lasting image of the book is not of a disaster in which a disparate bunch of people fell to their deaths, but a group of the victims’ friends and relatives gathered together to do honor and service in their name. Not the deaths of the victims but the charity of their survivors is the point of the Wilder’s wise and compassionate book.
As with the survivors in Wilder’s novel, we hope that the memory of all those who have died of Covid-19 may inspire us to love and care for each other and our world with a greater sense of commitment and urgency. Like Wilder, we will always be called to ponder the great questions concerning the meaning of life – questions religions and philosophes have been pondering for millennia – but in the end, all we can know for certain is that love freely given and gratefully received can powerfully shape our lives and our destinies if only we will only let it.