On the High Wire was written in 1972, when Petit was all of 23, and Paul Auster’s new translation of the book has just been published by New Directions. On the High Wire (2019) is a little (ahem, petit) thing, all of 115 pages including notes, with a trim size—4.5” x 7.3”—to match. In the hand it feels like a guidebook and reads like a dream diary. The book is both of those things.
Hope misses the city, and I miss Hope. So every other weekend I buy a bottle of wine and drive up the valley to see her and Little Girl in their new suburban home, where they live with Hope’s boyfriend, a pilot.
“Work on good prose has three steps: a musical phase when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, & a textile one when it is woven.” These words come from the brain of 20th-century philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin. But they’ve
The summer populations of flying insects/have fallen by more than 80 percent/in the past quarter century. This fact/is a fact I can’t think of very long.
I’m writing this on Monday the 16th. I hear a motor outside; is it them? I write because I want these things to be known. If something should happen to me, it’s important that people know what happened and how.
