Bridges Over Madison County Quotes

In an increasingly callous world, we all exist with our own carapaces of scabbed-over sensibilities. Where great passion leaves off and mawkishness begins, I’m not sure. But our tendency to scoff at the possibility of the former and to label genuine and profound feelings as maudlin makes it difficult to enter the realm of gentleness required to understand the story of Francesca Johnson and Robert Kincaid.

September 10, 1965 Dear Francesca, Enclosed are two photographs. One is the shot I took of you in the pasture at sunrise. I hope you like it as much as I do. The other is of Roseman Bridge before I removed your note tacked to it. I sit here trolling the gray areas of my mind for every detail, every moment, of our time together. I ask myself over and over, “What happened to me in Madison County, Iowa?” And I struggle to bring it together. That’s why I wrote the little piece, “Falling from Dimension Z,” I have enclosed, as a way of trying to sift through my confusion. I look down the barrel of a lens, and you’re at the end of it. I begin work on an article, and I’m writing about you. I’m not even sure how I got back here from Iowa. Somehow the old truck brought me home, yet I barely remember the miles going by. A few weeks ago, I felt self-contained, reasonably content. Maybe not profoundly happy, maybe a little lonely, but at least content. All of that has changed. It’s clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty humming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another. The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable—it could not have been any other way—a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable. So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity. Somehow, we must see each other again. Any place, anytime. Call me if you ever need anything or simply want to see me. I’ll be there, pronto. Let me know if you can come out here sometime—anytime. I can arrange plane fare, if that’s a problem. I’m off to southeast India next week, but I’ll be back in late October. I Love You, Robert P. S., The photo project in Madison County turned out fine. Look for it in NG next year. Or tell me if you want me to send a copy of the issue when it’s published. Francesca Johnson set her brandy glass on the wide oak windowsill and stared at an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of herself.

An elegant Italian woman, worldly, sophisticated. Francesca. At the end of World War II, she meets and marries an American soldier, moves with him to his small Iowan farm town of good people who bring carrot cakes to their neighbors, look after the elderly, and ostracize those who flout norms by, say, committing adultery. Her husband is kind, devoted, and limited. She loves her children. One day her family leaves town for a week, to show their pigs at a state fair. She's alone in the farmhouse for the first time in her married life. She relishes her solitude. Until a photographer fro National Geographic knocks on the door, asking directions to a nearby landmark... and they fall into a passionate, four-day affair. He begs her to run away with him; she packs her bags. Until, at the last minute, she unpacks them. Partly because she's married, and she has children, and the town's eyes are on them all. But also because she knows that she and the photographer have already taken each other to the perfect and beautiful world. And that now it's time to descend to the actual one. If they try to live in that other world for good, it will recede into the distance; it will be as if they'd never been there at all. She says goodbye, and they long for each other for the rest of their lives. Yet Francesca is quietly sustained by their encounter, the photographer creatively renewed. On his deathbed years later, he sends her a book of images he made, commemorating their four days together. If this story sounds familiar , it's because it comes from The Bridges of Madison County, a 1992 novel by Robert James Waller that sold more than twelve million copies, and a 1995 movie, starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood, that grossed $182 million. The press attributed its popularity to a rash of women trapped in unhappy marriages and pining for handsome photographers. But that's not what the story was really about. In the frenzy after the book came out, there were two camps: one that loved it because the couple's love was pure and endured over the decades. The other camp saw this as a copout--that real love is working through challenges of an actual relationship. Which was right?