One hand is tied to the tightrope walker...: Let the Great World Spin

Thinking for a minute about the symbolism or significance of the central motif of Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin," the crossing between the World Trade Center towers by unnamed aerialist (obviously modeled on the crossing by Philip Petit), set in August 1974, coincident with the resignation of Nixon: the events of the novel largely (except for back story, especially in the first section that introduces the Corrigan brothers) during the day of the tower crossing, and man of the characters either witness the crossing or interact in some way - in the courtroom where the walker is arraigned, for example - with the event. Isn't crossing the towers on a wire something like what the author/artist does? McCann, like the aerialist, makes an unexpected connection between separate and distinct events, does so artfully, imaginatively, while taking great risk, and in the public eye: to write a novel is like walking a tightrope, in particular a novel with multiple strands of plot. It's not just the grandeur of a novel, though there is that, but even writing a poem has the same qualities: uniting ideas and images that ordinarily are separate, going out there alone, taking a chance, living in public. I'd forgotten since my earlier reading of the novel about the section in which the hackers in a California computer lab, obviously developing some fledgling version of the Internet, probably through a military compact, patch in through a call to a phonebooth to get a first-hand account of the crossing: a very early, primitive look at the kind of instant world of communications today - shows how far ago we were in 1974: the world more connected, the towers themselves almost 10 years gone.