We are living in unbalanced times. it is the most and least human of centuries. We have made spectacular leaps forward in science, medicine, art and technology, yet we are living through an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. Our satellites work, but we don’t know where we are. Our medicines heal, yet the anxiety lacerates. We have instant access to one another, yet we can hardly cross the street. We have more computing power in our fridges than put a man on the moon decades ago, but still we can’t feed the hungry.
And so, to correct the unbalance, I thought I would give my old pal, Philippe Petit, a call to see if he could make some sense out of a world living in the crazy quarrel of smashtime. Petit is famous for confounding the principles of gravity by walking on a thin line in air. Just this past summer, the 74-year-old strung a wire in New York’s Cathedral of Saint John the Divine to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his walk between the World Trade Center towers when he crisscrossed the tightrope a quarter of a mile in the sky, and shook our souls out in the process.
Even five decades on, and not quite so high in the air, Petit still looked like he was having sex with the wind. He stepped out onto the seven-eighths-inch wire with characteristic aplomb. Beneath him Sting, along with the rest of us mortals, looked up in wonder. Sting played his anthem “Fragile”: Tomorrow’s rain will wash the stains away, but something in our minds will always stay.
He still looked like he was having sex with the wind.
The outrageous beauty of Petit’s 1974 walk was brought to mind and the permanence of his artistic creation, the walk itself, stood in perfect opposition to the act of savage indifference that ripped us asunder 27 years later. This was a case of art outlasting violence. They may take down our buildings, but they can’t fly jetliners into our imaginations. Nor can they collapse our memories. The human spirit has a way of breaking through to the other side. And so, remarkably, things don’t always fall apart.
Not only had Petit lasted, but the taste of that gorgeously defiant walk remained with us. It imprinted itself on our retinas. It is tucked behind the mirror of our times. Look to downtown Manhattan, and you can still see a flyman parading across the sky. The beauty of it is that he will always be there.
Nowadays he spends most of his time in Upstate New York, and the rest of it in his gloriously idiosyncratic head.
“I’m working on a dovetail joint,” Petit told me, referring to a piece he has been toiling on in his carpentry shop. “I’m following the plan of a master craftsman. It’s for a drawer I’m making to go with my worktable in my barn.”
It’s a perfect metaphor for the Frenchman. A dovetail joint is a complex technique that joins two pieces of wood together without nails. It is difficult to get right, but remarkably simple when done correctly. That’s Petit all the way. A simple conundrum. An elegant answer wrapped in a spinning enigma.
“I don’t have a philosophy of time,” he tells me. “I just forget about time. It disappears from me. I don’t have any notions of age either. Ageing doesn’t exist for me. I’m just busy doing my thing. I am physically active and strong and supple. I ride my unicycle. I do my juggling. I practise on the high wire. I have my own programme of jogging and weightlifting. Two to three hours a day. One day, of course, my body may refuse to do all of these things, but for now I just don’t even acknowledge the passing of time.”
And what of our political landscape?
"Ageing doesn’t exist for me."
“Politics? What is that? It’s like rain around me. So, it rains. And you have to get out of it. Maybe you borrow an umbrella or maybe—don’t tell anyone!—you steal an umbrella, but you do what you can to get out of the rain. Trump? I have no opinion on him. I know from friends that he’s a bad guy, I hear them saying it all the time, but I do not understand politics. Perhaps that makes me an imbecile? But I know that the world is not a great place to be and a lot of things are wrong. Men are destroying our habitats and our climate and eventually they will also destroy themselves. They will do this 20 years from now, too. But I’m an artist. That’s what I do. That’s what I came for. And politics will not change my condition as an artist.”
Petit has never had any fear of death. Never has, never will. “I love life,” he says. “It’s not a death wish I have, people think it’s a death wish, but that’s crazy, it’s a life wish. I like to feel alive. That’s why I walk the wire. I don’t think about falling. It doesn’t even cross my mind. I have absolutely no respect for death. Eventually death will find me, but I’m not worried.”
Death has indeed found a few of his friends in recent times, not least the writer Paul Auster to whom he was, and is still, very close. “I don’t suppose I miss my departed friends in the usual way. They descend upon me at unexpected moments. I am not really interested in the normal mathematics of grief. With Paul, maybe I am listening to music, or maybe I am walking past a bookshelf with his complete works, or maybe I just see a pen on the table, and suddenly he is entirely there.”
I’m reminded, while talking to Petit, of Niels Bohr, the Danish theoretical physicist who said that the opposite of a profound truth may very well be another profound truth. After all, what is the beginning and end of a tightrope walk? The same place and a new place, all at once. Petit has been at them all. Greatness is a lack of fear. From the age of 18 he has been walking wires, and he has no intention of giving up. His journey has always been to find the point of perfect tension between chaos and order. The balance in him is the same balance that will be there tomorrow, made possible by yesterday.
He is not in it for the adulation. His favourite moment is always the few seconds of stunned silence before the applause. It is then that he hears the air within the air. There are no future performances confirmed yet, but there are several possibilities, he says. In recent times he has also been putting pen to paper. An autobiography. He floors me when he says that he hasn’t yet found a publisher—not only is he an extraordinary writer who has written several books over the years, but he has more stories than just about anyone I know. “I’ve long since stopped trying to understand,” he says. “Sometimes the phone rings and sometimes it doesn’t. But the book is there. Do you want to read it?”
Damn sure I want to read it. In fact, in these broken times, Petit makes me think of those Japanese kintsugi artists, where pottery that is broken becomes more beautiful when repaired. A lot of things can be taken from us—our countries, our identities, even our lives—but not our stories of these things, and Petit the wirewalker has many stories, all of which lead us from one good place to the next.
Hallelujah, then, to the unbalanced times.
Colum McCann is the author of the US National Book-Award-winning book Let The Great World Spin, which features a fictionalised version of Philippe Petit. His most recent novel, Twist, is out now.
