“The Bridges of Madison County” is a beautifully written book. It’s one of the most memorable romantic, magically stirring story of true love I’ve ever read. This book was followed in 1995 by a well-received Hollywood film of the same name starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood. No one other than who's truely loved and lost his or her love ....can understand this book or the movie.This timeless £ove story stays stuck to moi soul making moi teary eyed each time i read the book or watch the movie. How Robert remains utterly dedicated to Francesca,though he never hears from her or sees her again. He never has sex again or any other relationships.
This is a love story of "Anguish" and the strangely "€xquisite suffering".
Story of true love, love which can survive total separation intact and unharmed.How two people accidently are joined in an experience of uncommon truth and stunning beauty that will haunt them forever. This remains the most romantic classic of the 1990'. The book has truly been able to capture intrinsically The story of Robert Kincaid, the photographer and free spirit searching for the covered bridges of Madison County, and Francesca Johnson, the farm wife waiting for the fulfillment of a girlhood dream, THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY movie further gives voice to the longings of men and women everywhere-and shows us what it is to love and be loved so intensely that life is never the same again.
I truly believe that yes Francesca & Robert Kincaid were indeed
"STAR ~ CROSSED"lovers in the traditional sense, where everything was right except the timing.
It was the truest £ove lost in the "Abyss of destiny's tyranny"
I think these touching letters summarises the intense, lasting love story in “The Bridges Of Madison County”
Dear Francesca,
I hope this finds you well. I don't know when you'll receive it. Sometime after I'm gone. I'm sixty-five now, and it's been thirteen years ago today that we met when I came up your lane looking for directions.
I'm gambling that this package won't upset your life in any way. I just couldn't bear to think of the cameras sitting in a secondhand case in a camera store or in some stranger's hands. They'll be in pretty rough shape by the time you get them. But, I have no one else to leave them to, and I apologize for putting you at risk by sending them to you.
I was on the road almost constantly from1965 to 1975. Just to remove some of the temptation to call you or come for you, a temptation I have virtually every waking moment of my life, l took all of the overseas assignments I could find. There have been times, many of them, when I've said, "The hell with it. I'm going to Win- terset, Iowa, and, whatever the cost, take Francesca away with me."
But I remember your words, and I respect your feelings. Maybe you were right; I just don't know. I do know that driving out of your lane that hot Friday morning was the hardest thing I've ever done or will ever do. In fact, I doubt if few men have ever done anything more difficult than that.
I left National Geographic in 1975 and have been devoting the remainder of my shooting years mostly to things of my own choosing, picking up a little work where I can get it, local or regional stuff that keeps me away only a few days at a time. It's been tough financially, but I get along. I always do. Much of my work is around Puget Sound. I like it that way. It seems as men get older they turn toward the water.
Oh, yes, l have a dog now, a golden retriever. I call him "Highway," and he travels with me most of the time, head hanging out the window, looking for good shots.
In 1972, I fell down a cliff in Maine, in Acadia National Park, and broke my ankle. The chain and medallion got torn off in the fall. Fortunately they landed close by. I found them again, and a jeweler mended the chain.
I live with dust on my heart. That's about as well as I can put it. There were women before you, a few, but none after. I made no conscious pledge to celibacy; I'm just not interested.
I once watched a Canada goose whose mate had been shot by hunters. They mate for life, you know. The gander circled the pond for days, and more days after that. When I last saw him, he was swimming alone through the wild rice, still looking. I suppose that analogy is a little too obvious for literary tastes, but it's pretty much the way I feel.
In my imagination, on foggy mornings or afternoons with the sun bouncing off northwest water, I try to think of where you might be in your life and what you might be doing as I'm thinking of you. Nothing complicated--- going out to your garden, sitting on your front porch swing, standing at the sink in your kitchen.
Things like that. I remember everything. How you smelled, how you tasted like the summer. The feel of your skin against mine, and the sound of your whispers as I loved you.
Robert Penn Warren once used the phrase"a world that seems to be God-abandoned." Not bad, pretty close to how I feel some of the time. But I cannot live that way always. When those feelings become too strong, I load Harry and go down the road with Highway for a few days.
I don't like feeling sorry for myself. That's not who I am. And most of the time I don't feel that way. Instead, I am grateful for having at least found you. We could have flashed by one another like two pieces of cosmic dust.
God or the universe or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of balance and order does not recognize Earth-time. To the universe, four days is no different than four billion light years. I try to keep that in mind.
But, I am, after all, a man. And all the philosophic rationalizations I can conjure up do not keep me from wanting you, every day, every moment, the merciless wail of time, of time I can never spend with you, deep within my head.
I love you, profoundly and completely. And I always will.
The last cowboy,
Robert
P. S., I put another new engine in Harry last summer, and he's doing fine
~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~
September 10, 1965
Dear Francesca,
Enclosed are two photographs. One is the shop 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 grey 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. Tough 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 ensure 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 day - 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, any time.
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
ps the photo project in Madison County turned out fine. Look for it in National Geographic next year. Or tell me if you want me to send a copy of the issue when it's published.
~ From The Bridges Of Madison County by Robert James Waller
