The Bridge of San Luis Rey

by Thornton Wilder

I claim that human affection contains a strange unanalyzable consolation and that is all.

In the old sense, there is a “mystery” here. It is related to the mystery behind all creative literature above a certain level. Art is confession; art is the secret told. Art itself is a letter written to an ideal mind, to a dreamed-of audience. The great letter-sequences are written to close friends. But even the closest friends cannot meet the requirements of the artist, and the work passes over their shoulder to that half-divine audience that artists presuppose. All of Mme. de Sévigné’s life was built

The audience of a work of art is never clear in a true artist’s mind, but is made of souls that he has guessed at

But art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and to hide it at the same time. And the secret is nothing more than the whole drama of the inner life, the alternations between one’s hope of self-improvement and one’s self-reproach at one’s failures. “Out of our quarrels with other people we make rhetoric,” said William Butler Yeats; “out of our quarrels with ourselves we make literature.” Self-reproach is the first and the continuing state of the soul. And it is the way we go about assuaging that reproach that makes us do anything valuable.