Philippe Petit, Still Soaring

Philippe Petit is one of the great artists of the 20th century, and now the 21st. He is the walker in the clouds, the poet of wires, the man who, on an August morning in 1974, gave New York City “a gift of astonishing, indelible beauty” (in the words of Paul Auster, the novelist), a gift the city would never forget, even less so now that the towers are gone: walks back and forth, on a wire, between the then unfinished North and South towers of the World Trade Center. He was 24.

He was and remains a lot more than a tightrope walker, his artistry breaking bounds of the common in literal and unexpected ways: one doesn’t imagine being moved to tears by a man walking on a rope hundreds of feet in the air, but Petit does that, and to hear him speak you begin to understand why: he is a cloud-walker even when on ground the rest of us are stuck to.

“Improvisation,” he says in this absorbing 19-minute Ted talk from march, “is empowering because it welcomes the unknown. And since what’s impossible is always unknown, it allows me to believe I can cheat the impossible. Now, I have done the impossible not once but many times. ” The talk culminates with the story he tells of walking a rope between two points in Jerusalem, across a valley, with 80,000 people below, Arabs and Jews at one point in union.

“And when you see mountains, remember, mountains can be moved.” Watch.

See Also:

• Outlawing Creative Subversions