When I was in 10th grade, I read Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Our Town. Under the influence of a kind teacher, I was looking for “universal truths.”
Literature was full of them, she said. Universal truths were a magical ingredient, turning an ordinary novella or play into literature. All aspiring writers should know about them.
I began to mark specimens — or passages that I thought might be specimens — in the margins of my books. (Making marginal notes was a departure for a young man who had been taught not to desecrate books with doodles.)
My search for universal truths didn’t last long. I soon became convinced that the concept was not a useful way of looking at the world. (But I still make notes in the margins of my books, a testament to a teacher’s influence.)
That year was my last complete year of school. It dawned on me that I have not reread Wilder as I’ve reread so many other writers. I ought to at least find out why I bounced off him as a teenager.
Late in life, Wilder wrote a letter to a friend quoting one of Chekhov’s maxims for writers:
It is not the business of writers . . . to answer the great questions (let the theologians and philosophers do that if they feel they must) but ‘to state the questions correctly.’
That rings true to me.
• Source: Dennis Drabelle, “Book review: ‘Thornton Wilder: A Life,’ by Penelope Niven"; The Washington Post, Nov. 30, 2012.
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