The true audacity of hope: The Twin Towers and the man who walked the air between them (There are things no terrorist can destroy)
Let’s start with this poem, called ‘Life and love’:
The Towers fall;
the dead lie buried.
Dust is settling down.
The city reels,
recovers.
Life and love go on.
I think of you -
I think of swallows
that outran the storm.
The clouds are rising.
All around us lightning strikes
and life and love go on.
Obama called it the ‘audacity of hope.’ This is not about him though – but it is about audacity, and it is about hope:
“I am in the middle of nowhere, I am holding on to nothing, I am the play of the winds,” says the 58-year-old Frenchman, Philippe Petit, recalling the morning in August 1974 when he boldly and illegally crossed the sizeable gap between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre by shuffling across a steel cable less than 1in thick, and at a height of 1,350ft.
So, now James Marsh has made this documentary about Petit and his walk between The Towers, called ‘Man on the Wire’.
In an interview Petit answers one, hugely predictable question the only way it could have been answered:
Concerning the absence of any reference to the 9/11 attacks in the documentary, he says: “This was about glorifying the life of the tower, whereas the whole Universe knows about the death of it.”
Indeed – and, no doubt, that will be the image that will stay with me, and countless others: The man walking the thin thread that was hung between these majestic towers.
Yes, we know those images are old – and that the Towers did come down – but that doesn’t matter. For we have always known that it is easy to destroy.
Of course, destruction is real; as is grief, as is rage.
Still, here we have this image of a man on a tightrope, walking between those towers that we know so well. In one world, they are no longer there but in an another world, and in our minds, they are still with us. In this sense, in our dreams, and in the fact that one man walked upon air in between them, the Twin Towers will live forever.
The audacity of hope, yes - or, as Philippe Petit said, “I am in the middle of nowhere, I am holding on to nothing.”
As we are still holding on to hope - and holding on to life, and love. So, maybe it is not that easy to destroy some things, after all.
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