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A review by twas
The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story by Richard Bach
4.0
When your partner (whom is everything you look for in a partner) recommends you read a book (particularly a love story, I think), you should read it.
There are plenty of love stories in the world. Perhaps too many. Too many, because they tend to focus on the beginnings of romantic love, the dizzy honeymoon phase when things are buttercups and rainbows and they get married, The End.
This book does not end as soon as the romance is formed. It is a story of two real people, and how they struggled with each other and themselves, and ultimately found deeper meaning and room to grow together well into their relationship. If anything, I wish the book was longer, and that it explored how a love develops over decades. Does anyone write such stories? I'd be ever so pleased to hear recommendations...
If you do pick up this book, be warned: Richard Bach starts out as an asshole. An interesting, philosophically principled asshole in his way, but one whose ideals and search for the Perfect Woman lead him to a lonely life full of geographically dispersed lovers. If he starts getting too close with one, he takes off in his plane lest his Freedom be sacrificed.
**SPOILERS**
By the end of the book he has discovered a different kind of freedom which comes from engaging deeply in a relationship with one woman, whom he calls his soulmate.
There's a lot going on here. A lot of it challenges my worldview, and as Richard implores of his ideas: "Please give me ideas that do no violence to my intuition."
The quandry for me comes from my empirical worldview, which, as a wedding of science and mysticism, holds personal experience as the highest truth. If Richard and Leslie claim to have out-of-body experiences with each other, have dreams that connect them to their past and future selves, may I be the last in line to denounce them. They had that experience, and I have not, but then again I have not been trying.
It raises so many questions for me. Is there a soulmate for each of us? How many truly find them? How often are we deceived by hope or circumstance that a life partner is in hand, only years of divorce settlements later to find that we were wrong? How does one know when they have found a soulmate (as Leslie says, it is the possibility of intense intimacy and joy...)? Have we all lived past lives, in human form? Do we have souls? Are they human-shaped souls, gendered, tied to a physical form or is it more fluid than that (my intuition, no violence please, suggests the latter)? And of course, what does all of this mean when viewed through the lens of my current romantic situation?
I could get mightily personal here, but book reviews are not therapeutic outlets. Suffice it to say, this book led me to examine my own shortcomings/ room for growth/ foibles and I am grateful.
This book brought me to tears, not when Richard and Leslie nearly broke up due to his asinine behavior, but when they finally were in a loving, productive relationship.
As I write I hear the couple next door arguing through the walls.
Breathe deeply, open yourself to possibilities, love genuinely, and be set free.
There are plenty of love stories in the world. Perhaps too many. Too many, because they tend to focus on the beginnings of romantic love, the dizzy honeymoon phase when things are buttercups and rainbows and they get married, The End.
This book does not end as soon as the romance is formed. It is a story of two real people, and how they struggled with each other and themselves, and ultimately found deeper meaning and room to grow together well into their relationship. If anything, I wish the book was longer, and that it explored how a love develops over decades. Does anyone write such stories? I'd be ever so pleased to hear recommendations...
If you do pick up this book, be warned: Richard Bach starts out as an asshole. An interesting, philosophically principled asshole in his way, but one whose ideals and search for the Perfect Woman lead him to a lonely life full of geographically dispersed lovers. If he starts getting too close with one, he takes off in his plane lest his Freedom be sacrificed.
**SPOILERS**
By the end of the book he has discovered a different kind of freedom which comes from engaging deeply in a relationship with one woman, whom he calls his soulmate.
There's a lot going on here. A lot of it challenges my worldview, and as Richard implores of his ideas: "Please give me ideas that do no violence to my intuition."
The quandry for me comes from my empirical worldview, which, as a wedding of science and mysticism, holds personal experience as the highest truth. If Richard and Leslie claim to have out-of-body experiences with each other, have dreams that connect them to their past and future selves, may I be the last in line to denounce them. They had that experience, and I have not, but then again I have not been trying.
It raises so many questions for me. Is there a soulmate for each of us? How many truly find them? How often are we deceived by hope or circumstance that a life partner is in hand, only years of divorce settlements later to find that we were wrong? How does one know when they have found a soulmate (as Leslie says, it is the possibility of intense intimacy and joy...)? Have we all lived past lives, in human form? Do we have souls? Are they human-shaped souls, gendered, tied to a physical form or is it more fluid than that (my intuition, no violence please, suggests the latter)? And of course, what does all of this mean when viewed through the lens of my current romantic situation?
I could get mightily personal here, but book reviews are not therapeutic outlets. Suffice it to say, this book led me to examine my own shortcomings/ room for growth/ foibles and I am grateful.
This book brought me to tears, not when Richard and Leslie nearly broke up due to his asinine behavior, but when they finally were in a loving, productive relationship.
As I write I hear the couple next door arguing through the walls.
Breathe deeply, open yourself to possibilities, love genuinely, and be set free.