I recently finished two books unrelated to each other except by the accidental time of their completion.  Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” is a short novel about a bridge collapse in colonial Peru and a friar’s attempt to elucidate why precisely those five people were killed by it.  In style, it resembles “The Eighth Day,” another Wilder novel: it also assumes an omniscient narrator and a journalistic style.  I suppose these days Wilder would be accused of telling instead of showing, but what kind of omniscient is a narrator that doesn’t cut to the chase and explain a person in a sentence or two?  Besides, even in telling, Wilder turns beautiful phrases and paints interesting people, that do interact and change in the course of the novel.  The story is rather unremarkable, almost perfunctory; the novel shines with its philosophical musings and precise setting.  Thus, three quotes in lieu of a review.

Like all beautiful women who have been brought up amid continual truibutes to their beauty she assumed without cynicism that it must necessarily be the basis of anyone’s attachment to herself […].  This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love save love as passion.  Such love, though it expend itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest.  Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties.  Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer – a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude of altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon.

All, all of us have failed.  One wishes to be punished.  One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love – I scarcely dare say it – but in love our very mistakes don’t seem to be able to last long?

Okay, four, with the conclusion:

Even memory [i.e. not being forgotten – ed.] 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.

The second book, “The Valley of Vision,” is a collection of Puritan prayers, assembled by Arthur Bennett from the following original writers: Richard Baxter, David Brainerd, John Bunyan, Christmas Evans, William Jay, Henry Law, William Romaine, Thomas Shepard, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Augustus M. Toplady, Thomas Watson, Isaac Watts, and William Williams.  What struck me time and again was the sharp sense of their own sinful nature that these men carried with them, something I believe is a gift God doesn’t distribute evenly.  In these men it brought forth humility and a great desire to share the gospel.

Bennett laid out the prayers like prose poetry, and I found that an apt approach, not only because the prayers contained sufficient poetic elements to justify looking like a poem, but also because I struggled to finish the book just like I struggle to finish poetry tomes.  Absent any narrative, the writing is so dense with meaning that more than one poem or prayer at a time starts muddling things in my mind; a few of them really resonate with me, but get overwhelmed by the sheer amount.  So it takes me a long time to read the book, and at the end I feel like I have gotten far less from it than I should have.  It’s worse when the authors are eminent hymn-writers such as these!  I suspect I need an instruction manual for reading poetry collections…

At any rate, Jon pointed out that Sovereign Grace Music published a CD based on excerpts of this book, so unless you like poetry and prayer anthologies, the CD may be the way to go.  I think I would have preferred it, too.  It would have taken me less time, and I might have been able to remember more of it.