Highwire Act

Philippe Petit did not lose friends or relatives in the collapse of the World Trade Center two weeks ago. He didn't lose officemates or important work that he'd left on his desk. He didn't even lose, as many of us have, his faith in humanity. But the tightrope walker did lose something invaluable on September 11, 2001: He lost his muse.

"I was just staring at the screen saying 'unbelievable, unbelievable,' over and over," said Petit, who earned fame on Aug. 7, 1974 by dancing on a tightrope he'd secretly strung between the Twin Towers, a stunt that put the then-unfinished World Trade Center on the map for reasons far greater than even its massive height.

"My friends called and said, 'They've destroyed your towers!' Obviously, I can not even talk about it without acknowledging the human loss at those buildings, but I did have an intimate relationship with them - I even called them 'my towers' - and now they're gone."

In 1974, of course, Petit's highwire act was a bit of absurdist art designed to put a smile on the faces of those faceless downtown officeworkers forced to toil in a nondescript tower with windows so narrow that they didn't even get to enjoy the view that should have been their compensation.

But looking back at Petit's stunt today, with the buildings gone and so many of those once-anonymous workers staring out from "Missing" posters hanging outside every city hospital, the midair walk takes on a poignancy far beyond the act itself.

To understand the enormity of what Petit accomplished, it is necessary to do something painful: Rebuild those 110-story monoliths in your mind. See them standing. See them dwarfing all the other skyscrapers around them, some of which were, in their own day, the tallest buildings in the world.