On Wednesday and Thursday of this week, Philippe Petit will walk a highwire across the nave of St. John the Divine in New York City, the world’s largest cathedral. “My love for magnificent places and my love for walking on the tightrope and sharing with an audience my passion has not changed,” he said.
He’s walked this space many times before. But this week’s walks will not really be about here and now; they’ll be a celebration of that other walk, the one he spectacularly took 50 years ago, on August 7. 1974, between the Twin Towers, a quarter of a mile up.
Petit said, “I can see a photograph, and immediately that pulls me into remembering – remembering not only with my brain, but with my body.”
He crossed back and forth eight times in 45 minutes. For the Oscar-winning documentary “Man on Wire,” he wanted music by Erik Satie: “The first ‘Gymnopédie’ is a piece of music that is made of suspension, it’s made of silence, it’s made of hesitation, it’s made of nothingness.”
Just like his dance in the sky.
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“I had conserved my sense of rebellion and my sense of poetry,” Petit said. He was impish, playful, and a bit cocky when the NYPD hauled him off to the station. Asked by a reporter why he did it, Petit replied, “When I see a beautiful place to put my wire, I cannot resist.”
Petit was charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct, a colossal understatement for what he called his “coup.” (The charges were later dropped.) “In French when you rob a bank, it’s a coup, you know? What you say in America, the caper,” he said.
For months Petit performed in the streets of New York to finance the stealth operation. He and his accomplices skulked around, sneaking into the still-unfinished World Trade Center, plotting how to get their equipment inside, and how to string a wire between the towers using a bow and arrow.
Asked if he liked all the trickery involved, Petit said, “Oh, I love it!”
Recently he overlooked the site of the World Trade Center from 80 stories up. “It’s interesting to know that at the Twin Towers, I was actually 30 stories higher,” he recalled. “I stop in the middle of one of my walk, and I sit on the cable. I was able to look and to marvel at what I was looking at, and to think nobody in the world had ever walked so high, and nobody had seen what I am seeing.”
And nobody would ever again, after the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11.
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Petit said, “Inside my heart, they’re not gone. And that’s what you do when somebody you love dies; you carry them with you, and they’re still alive in some way.”
Philippe Petit is 74 now, about to turn 75. He lives in Upstate New York, and has a highwire in his backyard. He likes to say age means nothing to him.
His performance on Wednesday will be, by his count, his 100th public walk. Rehearsing for it, his concentration is ferocious, his preparation fanatical, as if his life depended on it (which it does).
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“There is no fear,” he said. “Why should I make a mistake if I put my entire mind and body into feeling myself being alive? And even if … really, I know my body’s slowly refusing to get my brain’s order, still I will have the joy of rediscovering the magic of balance every day by practicing.”
Strung across his backyard is a bit of history: “This is the actual historic (one would say legendary) cable that I used between the Twin Towers,” he said. “It was very long, so I cut it.”
Walking it 50 years later, he’s still the rebel poet, still defying anybody who says, “No, you can’t.”
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Story produced by Young Kim. Editor: Chad Cardin.
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