Philippe Petit
ivory linen card stock, sepia ink, chain
$25 at my Etsy shop
“When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers; I walk.”
Philippe Pettit is the man who snuck up to the top of the twin towers right after they were built, strung a wire between them, and walked the wire high up in the clouds between the towers.
He was a man obsessed, in love, and intoxicated with the joy of it all. He planned carefully and intelligently, and up there at one point he says he lay down on the wire with the gods of the wire and the gods of the sky all around him.
The police came for him, of course, waiting on each tower reaching out to him at either end of the wire. He says that he retreated from each tentacled mass of arms as long he liked, and he walked. He walked.
When he came down and they asked him why he did it, this is what he said: “When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers; I walk.”
There’s a man who really understands how to live the good life.
