Transcript from The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Marian Seldes: And it occurred to me that we all
think when there’s a- an unexplained death that we don’t understand, a
random shooting or something like that, we think why, why those people?
Host: Sister Maureen Fiedler
Sister Maureen Fiedler: But this is where we
begin to look at it through the eyes of brother Juniper who witnessed
this bridge breaking. And he begins to think theologically.
Sam Waterston:
Anyone else would have said to himself with secret joy: “Within ten
minutes, myself … !” But it was another thought that visited Brother
Juniper: “Why did this happen to those five?” If there were any plan in
the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely
it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly
cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by
plan and die by plan. And on that instant Brother Juniper made the
resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons, that
moment falling through the air, and to surprise the reason of their
taking off.
Host: Brother Juniper busily spent the next six
years compiling data about the five who fell from the Bridge, attempting
to find scientific proof of god’s intention. Here’s Thornton Wilder
himself reading from the beginning of the novel.
Wilder: It seemed to Brother Juniper that it was
high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences, and
he had long intended putting it there. What he lacked hitherto was a
laboratory. But this collapse of the Bridge of San Luis Rey was a sheer
act of God. It afforded a perfect laboratory. Here at last one could
surprise his intentions in a pure state.
Host: Novelist Russell Banks.
Russell Banks: The novel itself is, is essentially a
quest by Brother Juniper to, through the process of tracking these five
lives backwards, to explain why this event happened to them and not to
someone else who might have been crossing the bridge at that moment.
Host: Poet and critic J.D. McClatchy.
J.D. McClatchy: In the course of his investigations,
he goes, digs deeply into the lives of the five people who are killed,
who are thrown from the bridge when it collapsed over a great gorge in
Peru. He thinks that by looking closely into the lives of each of these
five people, he can discover some reason why this horrible accident
happened, and how it was or was not a part of a divine plan.
Russell Banks: I think at its heart, it’s about the
conflict between faith and fact, and it attempts to look at a terrible
event, the deaths of five people, perhaps even one could call it random
deaths of five people, through both those lenses, fact and faith.
Excerpts of music composed by and used courtesy of Jeffrey Roden
