1956

That is what our Nobel Prize Winner Ivo Andric said about bridges

People in Serbia guard bridges with their bare bodies, every day and night

    Of all that a man is impelled to build in this life, nothing is in my eyes finer and more precious than a bridge. Bridges are more important than houses, holier, because more all-embracing, than places of worship. Belonging to everyone and at the same for everyone, useful, built always rationally, in a place in which the greatest number of human needs coincide, they are more enduring than other buildings and serve nothing which is secret or evil.

    Great stone bridges, witness of vanished ages when people lived, thought and built differently, grey or stained with the wind and rain, their sharply chiselled lines worn down, with thin grass growing or birds nesting in their joins and imperceptible cracks. Slender iron bridges, stretched from one shore to the other like a wire, shaking and resounding with every train that hurtles over them; they seem still to be waiting for their final form and perfecton, and the beaty of their lines will be fully disclosed only to the eyes of our grandchildren. Wooden bridges on the way into the little towns of Bosnia whose furrowed planks sink and creak under the hooves of the village horses like the keys of a xylophone. And, finally, those tiny bridges in the mountains, nothing but a largish tree trunk or two logs riveted together, thrown across a wild stream that would be impassable without them. Twice a year in flood the torrent sweeps them away, but the peasants, blindly persistent as ants, cut, plane and build another. That is why one often sees beside those mountain streams, in eddies between rocks, the remains of bridges; they lie and rot like the other wood washed up there by chance, but those worked logs, destined to rot or burn, stand out from the rest of the driftwood and remind one always of the purpose they once served.

    They are all in essence the same and equally worthy of our attention, for they point out places where a man came across an obstacle and did not turn away, but overcame it, bridges it as best he could, according to his way of thinking, taste and the circumstances around him.

    And when I think of bridges, it is not the ones I have crossed most frequently that come to my mind, but those which most held my attention and enthralled me.

    Above all, the bridges of Sarajevo. On the Miljacka, whose bed is the spine of Sarajevo,they are like stone veterbrae. I see them clearly and count them all. I know their arches, I remember their parapets. Among them is one which bears the fateful name of a young man,it is small but constant, withdrawn like a good, silent fortress that knows neither surrender nor betrayal. Then, there are bridges I saw on my travels, by night from trains, slender and white as ghosts. Stone bridges in Spain, overgrown with ivy and lost in contemplation of their own image in dark water. Wooden bridges in Switzerland, roofed against heavy snowfalls, they look like long barns and are decorated inside with paintings of saints or miraculous events, like chapels. Fantastic bridges in Turkey, flung up roughly, preserved and protected by fate. Roman bridges in southern Italy, made of white stone, from which time has erased all that could be erased and beside which a new bridge has been in use for a hunderd years, but which still stand, like skeletons on guard.

    So, everywhere in the world, wherever my thoughts wander or pause, they come upon faithful,silent bridges as the eternal and eternally unsatisfied human desire to link, to reconcile and join all that there should be no divisions, no confrontation, and no parting.

    It is the same in my dreams and in my shifting imagination. Listening to the bitterest, most beautiful music I have ever heard, I suddenly saw a stone bridge, severed, the broken halves stretching painfully towards each other, demonstrating with one last effort the only possible line of the arch that had disappeared. That is the faithfulness, the irreconcilability of beauty, which permits only one single possibility besides itself: non-existence.

    In the end, everything through which this life of ours is expressed - thoughts, efforts, glances, smiles, words, sighs - is all reaching out to another shore, as towards its aim, and only there will it be granted its true meaning. Everywhere there is something to overcome or bridge: disorder, death, meaninglessness. Everything is transition, a bridge whose ends are lost in infinity, beside which all the bridges of this earth are only children's toys, pale symbols.

    And all our hope lies on the other side.

Ivo Andric
Nobel Prize Winner