Imagine being someone who’s just doing a job or crossing on foot on a bridge from one side of a river to the other for a variety of reasons. Then, suddenly, the bridge collapses. And those on the bridge plunge to the abyss below.
Who were these people? Why were they there? What were their family lives like? Their pleasures, their griefs?
This isn’t about the Baltimore Bridge incident. But then again it might be.
Thornton Wilder’s novel, The Bridge at San Luis Rey was published in 1927 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928. According to Wikipedia, the novel “tells the story of several interrelated people who die in the collapse of an Inca rope bridge in Peru, and the events that lead up to their being on the bridge. A friar who witnesses the accident then goes about inquiring into the lives of the victims, seeking some sort of cosmic answer to the question of why each had to die.”
The six workers who were repairing potholes on the Francis Scott Key Bridge earlier this week surely had no inkling that their lives would end that night. Nor did anyone who knew them.
There will be profiles in the local publications and possibly, because of national interest in the incident, they’ll be featured in The New York Times. But if you want a philosophical approach to why such things happen, then consider reading Wilder’s book in the context of the Baltimore Bridge.
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