Let the Great World Spin While We Remember

By Rachel Hammer
rachel@olmstedcountyjournal.com

Mon, Sep 10th, 2012
Posted in Columnists

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Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin is a magnetic resonance image of New York City. Lit in loops of neon, amid a shuffling cycle of people, ideas, and money, the sleepless, electric multi-culture of NYC draws a current of international attention as the world’s babbling tower of commerce, art, and literature. In September 2001, many stopped blindly spinning for a moment, and looked. McCann describes this same call to attention in the shadow of 9/11, and generously tells the stories of strangers interconnected by their bearing witness to the man, a king really, funambulist and madman Phillippe Petit, who danced and spun upon a wire between the towers in August 1974. McCann’s novel suggests there is power, even duty, when humans collect to bear witness.

Several summers ago, I sat transfixed among twenty others listening to the opening pages of Let the Great World Spin read aloud. Most of us at the table had only ever visited New York City. We were outsiders to that world, but regardless, I was entranced by McCann’s litany of images. I felt like a silly spinning proton stopped, polarized at attention, allured by a force greater than the sum of mine alone. Closely reading, attention aligned, the members of our group experienced the temporary abandonment of our individual selves in exchange for the intersubjective witness that McCann’s characters also experience in the novel as they stand in awe of the man on wire. Together, at once, all watch the scene from a myriad separate vantage points, and the experience alters their lives and speeds their collisions with one another. In this way, Let the Great World Spin is like the 2004 film Crash. And both works seem to precedent the motif-mosaic style used by Jonathan Saffran Foer in his work Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to directly broach the subject of our greatest national tragedy.

At the reading years ago, we were prompted to write a representation of ourselves in that scene. One participant tearfully described himself oblivious to the man above on the wire. He told of his loneliness and of the companionship he found in words and books. Another wrote that he stood in the crowd and looked into the sun, letting his eyes burn until blind, so as not to see another fall. I wrote of myself as a young woman in a moment of found faith, stepping in among the watchers, the readers, the united, as though into a pew. I continued to feel this way throughout every page of the book—McCann has discovered how to image something like a collective soul.

As we remember 9/11 on its anniversary, this book is a worthy tribute, a love letter of sorts, to another time in New York City history when people turned to look up together.

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