“I observed the tightrope ‘dancer’ — because you couldn’t call him a ‘walker’ — approximately halfway between the two towers. And upon seeing us he started to smile and laugh and he started going into a dancing routine on the high wire. And when he got to the building we asked him to get off the high wire but instead he turned around and ran back out into the middle. He was bouncing up and down. His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would resettle back on the wire again.”
––The police officer who arrested Philippe Petit after his tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Center, August 7, 1974
What thou lovest well remains
the rest is dross.
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee.
––Ezra Pound, from Canto LXXXI
“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.”
––Septimus Hodge, the tutor in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia
5 Comments
September 12, 2009 at 1:40 am
Thank you for those wonderfully pertinent and apposite excerpts, especially the first. The sheer, joyous beauty of Petits outrageously audacious act is the best celebration of the soaring spirit of the Twin towers. He crossed the wire EIGHT times, for gods sake! It was windy up there, and the towers swayed naturally, due to their immense height, causing the wire to bounce. If you havent seen the hour long documentary recently broadcast on BBC, do; it will leave you gasping, ravished, astounded. My son and I watched it together, and he for whom the collapse of the Twin towers, endlessly played out on tv when he came home from school aged just four, is among his earliest memories, now has a positive and uplifting image to attach to the building. Petit (was it his real name, for he was very tiny?); Just one man, but a big message – about freedom, following your dream, focusing your talents, living for what you love.
September 12, 2009 at 11:02 am
Yes, Katy, I’d like to say thanks too. I associated the 9/11 memory with coming back from hospital with a baby scan – and then seeing these images on television. I’ve always been torn about the view of time expressed in your quote from Arcadia, wondering if it meant nothing in the here and now really matters as it all kind of comes out in the wash. But in the context of the tightrope dancer, that says to me, yes, live for now, other people may understand what you’re about much much later on, don’t wait for them to catch up.
September 12, 2009 at 11:12 am
Laura, thanks so much for that. And hey, if I’ve managed to help someone get that quote I’m happy. I saw Arcadia last week – there’s a wonderful revival of it in London that ends TODAY, with a friend of mine in it, and he sweetly helped me to scrape in at the last minute. I wanted to write something after, but it’s too late for a review – it would have to be some kind of hybrid “reflection” – and it’s been kind of a funny week. But as you can see it has stayed with me. It’s worth reading the script, you know, it reads like a novel. Very, very good.
Libby, yes, terrible times. I remember that week better than I’d like… But you know the full-length feature film, don’t you, Man on Wire? I even remember when he did it, hearing about it on the news and assuming – in the way of a precocious kid who doesn’t appreciate how impossible it is that anything should happen – that it was just some attention-seeking Evel Knieval nutter wannabe. Silly me. And now he’s our hero. You;ve gotta rent the DVD. Or buy it.
September 12, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Also, Ezra Pound’s use of “dross” is a contender for your saving of Old English words thread; although, it has saved and reinvented itself, proving language as a living thing – and ensuring Ezra’s poem can be understood as cool today.
September 12, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Yes, very good point! All that stuff. Flotsam. The Jetsons. There’s so much.