<p>NJTheatreMOM, what a bittersweet quote…to realize that you will not leave behind a lasting legacy, and to accept that your work during your brief time on earth is enough.</p>
<p>ignatius, jealous love – yes! (Where would Othello be without it?) Jealous love is also the catalyst for the meeting of the Perichole and the Marquesa. Don Andr</p>
<p>I see in the Abbess’s coming to a calm acceptance that “today is enough” a reflection of the message of Wilder’s famous play “Our Town.”</p>
<p>In “Our Town,” when the dead are able to go back and experience one day of life, they realize that there was a beauty and fullness in the moment-to-moment experience that they had been too restless and discontented to appreciate while they were alive.</p>
<p>It’s so interesting how many varied types of loves and relationships you all are finding within this little fable.
I haven’t read or seen “Our Town”, but it’s now in my Netflix queue. (too lazy to read it)</p>
<p>The Abbess is quite a practical woman. When Dona Clara visits her (page 105) she allows her entrance , realizing Dona Clara is a source of funding.
“She has just come from Spain. I don’t know”. ( a lay sister states)
“Oh, it is some money , Inez, some money for my house for the blind. Quick, bid her come in.”</p>
<p>And, as **Mary13 ** wrote above, the Abbess eventually asks Dona Clara “Will you let me show you my work?” </p>
<p>Smart Abbess. </p>
<p>The Abbess then leaves Dona Clara, saying " I must go into the room of the very sick and say a few words for them to think about when they cannot sleep. ** I will not ask you to come with me there, for you are not accustomed to such …sounds and things."
She looked up at her with her modest rueful smile. ** </p>
<p>(Is the Abbess manipulating Dona Clara?)</p>
<p>Then Camila arrives, “She is leaving me”, said the Abbess, "For some work across the city…: </p>
<p>Dona Clara looking at the sick in rows gazing at the ceiling. </p>
<p>And those who lay in their beds there felt that they were within a wall that the Abbess had built for them; ** within all was light and warmth, **and without was the darkness they would not exchange even for a relief from pain and from dying"</p>
<p>(Not sure how true that last part about exchanging relief, but the depiction of Light and Warmth quite lovely)</p>
<p>So I choose to think the Abbess’s work continued through Dona Clara’s relationship,funding, and Camila’s good works across the city. </p>
<p>Out of the tragedy of the bridge, and those five deaths lasting “legacy”.</p>
<p>The other lasting legacy are the letters. Page 16, “Henceforth letter -writing had to take the place of all the affection that could not be lived.
Hers were the letter that in an astonishing world have become the text-book of schoolboys…”
The Marquesa would have been astonished to learn that her letters were immortal"</p>
<p>SJCM: I too think the Abbess’ work continues on through Camila and Clara. Hence the reason I lean toward Wilder as optimist. I also think the narrator confirms this when he describes her as one of two great women of Peru as revealed by the perspective of history. The “houses” the Abbess builds stand after her death. </p>
<p>However, though I like the Abbess, I have to say that I never felt she loved Pepita.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The Abbess latched - correctly - on Pepita but she did not love the girl so much as love what the girl represented. Poor Pepita:
</p>
<p>In the passage NJTM quoted, the Abbess broods:
To me, the word idol as used here comes closest to this meaning - a mere image or semblance of something, visible but without substance, as a phantom. The Abbess sees an image of the Pepita the woman, her successor, not the young girl who loves her. I think the Abbess acknowledges her lack when she thinks
</p>
<p>and again when she talks to Clara:
</p>
<p>Ignatius, that’s why I included the Abbess in what I said back in post #66:</p>
<p>“Another category might be something that could maybe be called didactic love (?)…a fondness toward someone you want to teach and form and mold. That would apply to Pio’s love for Camila and the Abbess’s love for Pepita. I think it’s something a little bit different from maternal or paternal affection.”</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>NJTM: Yes! I forgot that post but you describe perfectly how I see the Abbess’ feelings about Pepita. I think Pio’s love toward Camila - and hers to him - while including didactic love, tends to be less straightforward, more tangled, until the only way Camila sees to pull away is to snip those ties.</p>
<p>Yeah, Pio’s love for Camila was definitely the most complicated, I think.</p>
<p>Ignatius, right you are about Madre Marie’s self interest regarding Pepita.
As NJTheatermom terms it “didactic love” !
Page 100
"Brother Juniper found that there was least to be learned from those who had been most closely associated with the subjects of his inquiry. ** Madre Marie del Pilar talked to him at length about Pepita, but she DID NOT TELL HIM of her OWN AMBITIONs for her. **</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes–sort of a “pay it forward” philosophy:</p>
<p>“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them.”</p>
<p>buenavista- I just reread your previous post, and I think we viewed the book in the same way.
You wrote : -but Wilder gives the last words to the Abbess, who is not concerned with that question at all. She just continues with her work. To me, what Wilder seems to be saying is that while the philosophical questions are interesting, they are beside the point, and it is people like the Abbess who make the real difference.</p>
<p>I am still grappling with the chapter titles-
Perhaps an Accident
Perhaps an Intention</p>
<p>Would anyone help explain? </p>
<p>And, if anyone can provide some biblical background about Corinthians 2, which is what Wilder says the Marquesa’s final letter resembled. </p>
<p>Or, Luke 13, the inspiration for Wilder’s story</p>
<p>I didn’t realize that Wilder wrote “Corinthians 2.” The famous biblical verses about love are actually in first Corinthians, and that’s what I figured he must have been referring to:</p>
<p>[1</a> Corinthians 13 NIV - If I speak in the tongues of men or of - Bible Gateway](<a href=“1 Corinthians 13 NIV1 - - Bible Gateway”>1 Corinthians 13 NIV - If I speak in the tongues of men or of - Bible Gateway)</p>
<p>NJTM: Wilder writes It is the famous Letter LVI, known to the Encyclopedists as her Second Corinthians because of its immortal paragraph about love. It looks to be an “authorial error.” (So darn, back to the timeline again. I mean if there’s one major error …)</p>
<p>Re that error and other “reflections” on The Bridge of San Luis Rey:</p>
<p>[Reflections</a> on Great Literature: Thornton Wilder](<a href=“http://qcpages.qc.edu/Biology/LahtiSites/greatlit/contempus/wilder/sanluisrey.htm]Reflections”>http://qcpages.qc.edu/Biology/LahtiSites/greatlit/contempus/wilder/sanluisrey.htm)</p>
<p>SJCM: I think Wilder explains those two chapter titles in the sentence that ends Part One: “Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, … ** hence the title Perhaps an Accident** … and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.” … and here the flip side, Perhaps an Intention.</p>
<p>I found the Luke 13 passage:</p>
<p>“There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish."</p>
<p>SouthJerseyChessMom: I really liked the link you posted to “The Big Read.”</p>
<p>It reminded me of this part, from Uncle Pio:</p>
<p>“He divided the inhabitants of this world into two groups, into those who had loved and those who had not. It was a horrible aristocracy, apparently, for those who had no capacity for love (or rather for suffering in love) could not be said to be alive and certainly would not live again after their death. They were a kind of straw population, filling the world with their meaningless laughter and tears and chatter and disappearing still loveable and vain into thin air.”</p>
<p>That “horrible aristocracy” included Dona Clara and Camila, until the bridge collapsed. And maybe even the Abbess, who comes to recognize her love for Pepita. But instead, as you say, they help continue the Abbess’s work and thus “live again.”</p>
<p>Could Wilder and his editors really have mixed up Corinthians I and II? It’s such an easy thing to check. His older brother was a minister (later professor at Harvard Divinity School) and Wilder himself was Ivy-educated! But, like the timeline, what would be the point of making it wrong?</p>
<p>Wilder was a student of French literature, and his statement about the Corinthians passage in Bridge of San Luis Rey refers to a French text: “It is the famous Letter LVI, known to the Encyclopedists as her Second Corinthians because of its immortal paragraph about love.”</p>
<p>The Encyclop</p>
<p>Just coming back to this discussion after some family events. I reread everyone’s comments and links. Very much appreciate all of your insights!
I keep coming back to the closing lines of the book. So beautiful! I think it’s so telling that it’s spoken by the Abbess. Her life really exemplifed love in action.
Actually, all the charactors who were the ones who loved had good intentions. The beloved could seem cold (the actress, the Marquessa’s d) but the ones who sought love seemed to be seeking meaning in life through the love they were seeking from others. Searching for God in a way.</p>
<p>Did Wilder make a mistake? Maybe. Who am I to doubt “Reflections on Great Literature”? It probably was an authorial error. But despite its famous passage, 1st Corinthians doesn’t have a corner on love. Love is an undercurrent of 2nd Corinthians as well, so just for fun, consider this:</p>
<p>In Wilder’s story, the Marquesa remembers with shame her previous letter to Do</p>
<p>Those 2nd Corinthians verses do seem very apropos, Mary! I don’t think you’re grasping at straws.</p>
<p>In the 20th century, 1st Corinthians is the better known text. Possibly back in the time of the Encyclop</p>
<p>Thanks, Mary! Even though it’s more subtle, it makes sense to me that he was really referring to 2nd Corinthians rather than 1st. And your quotes make an excellent case for that–they fit perfectly, and I agree that they sound like the Marquesa. And Esteban, as you note. Also Uncle Pio, in the way he talks about Camila–the text says he was rumored to also be her father.</p>
<p>Letters are a big theme in the book, and he chose to link them to a part of the Bible that is letters. I just don’t think he’d mix up the Corinthians. Not just his brother, but Wilder’s grandfather was a minister, and the biographical introduction to a book of Wilder’s letters says that his parents had a “habit of regularly reading aloud classics and Scripture during the childhood of the four children.” </p>
<p>Maybe he added this as a puzzle? Readers could assume he meant 1st Corinthians and feel like they found a mistake; those with more biblical knowledge (or–like the Abbess, Wilder anticipating the future–those with computers) can know what he really meant?</p>
<p>BTW, the creator of that “Reflections on Great Literature” website–he’s a professor of BIOLOGY at Queens College, emphasis on evolutionary biology and bird song. But he has a second PhD in moral philosophy and the philosophy of science. The literature thing is just a sideline for him! I feel SO inadequately accomplished now…</p>