Philippe Petit

And so, yeah, we all have our different memories of this.

And, you know, when I wrote Let the Great World Spin, it was to write it as a metaphor about 9-11 that, you know, Philippe Petit takes a tightrope and walks between two towers.

The, you know, the act of creation in opposition to the act of destruction.

It's an amazing book.

But I go down there in many ways.

And what I see, to be honest with you, I see...

The ghost of maybe not even the ghost of Philippe Petit, the tightrope walker whom I wrote about in that book, I still see him on the air.

I hope that doesn't sound weird to you when I go down there.

Mark, there was no World Trade Center tower security.

Remember Philippe Petit, the French high-wire stunt, their little walker?

Yeah.

His group was allowed to get their equipment into the World Trade Center towers, hook up the wires between

These are the towers of New York's World Trade Center.

They are 1,350 feet high, and this morning a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit, an accomplished aerialist who can't resist heights, walked a tight wire from tower to tower.

I love to go on the high wire.

You, you're never sure that you will do it because that's, the, the wind was big.

There is no why.

Just, uh, because, uh, um, when, when I see a beautiful place to put my wire, I cannot resist.

Philippe Petit, he really planned like one would plan a bank heist almost, et cetera, and he showed up in my office and said, "I'm a French journalist, and these two people are my assistants." So he came back to see me day after day.

Somehow or other, whenever we talked, he constantly got back to the question of, "How do these buildings move in the wind?"

there i've abandoned my cult film book with my son recently because we got really bored of watching some really bad films and we've been watching a run of docu films at the moment so i treated him to king of kong firstly which i absolutely love But the other week, we went back to a film that I first watched in my early 20s, which is James Marsh's Man on Wire from 2008.

And it's about a guy called Philippe Petit, who is basically a high wire artist.

He walks on tightrope and he decides his life dream is to walk between Twin Tower 1 and Twin Tower 2 in New York.

Now, the background to this is the first time I ever watched it was I was a much younger man and it blew my mind.

I sat for, I think it's in about an hour and 50, no, about an hour and a half long.

And I sat open mouth from start to finish at what a mesmerizing character Philippe Petit was and how absolutely mental the act that he was doing was um because it seems like he has no real reason for it outside of the pure thrill of doing it he wasn't doing it for any kind of monetary factor it must have been very expensive to knock together if you put it a metal timer from one that amount of length it must have cost so much money to do and he just seemed to do it for sheer kicks and i will never decide from my head why you would want to do that It's

an absolutely fascinating documentary.

I remember when it came out, I saw it.

The entire city of Manhattan seems to stop and look upward as a man steps out on a high wire strung between the towers.

This spurs off of the event of Philippe Petit, a man who did historically walk between the two towers right before they opened in 1974.

In this story, seemingly everyone has that story.

Where were you that day? What happened? Especially in this novel, where we so briefly get a glimpse of that man on the wire, and then we travel down to the streets below to meet the people of New York and be among them instead.

I really loved seeing as individual threads were pulled toward others in each of the subsequent chapters.

I loved the heartbreak and triumph of each of the storylines and the ways he developed his characters, especially through showing instead of telling.

The story of Philippe Petit, who is the tightrope walker, is really well known in our home because we have a picture book that won the Caldecott Medal in 2004 called The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.

It's beautifully illustrated and I have read it so many times to my children.