There shouldn’t be a man tightrope walking between buildings in New York City, and there shouldn’t be palm trees in Dublin. It’s unheard of to float up in the sky like that, that’s too crazy. But it happened. Dublin is too grey, to far north for palm trees, they couldn’t survive in that climate. But they’re there.
In Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann takes us to the crowded streets of Manhattan where crowds stop and watch the tightrope walker. The watchers pause their lives just to wonder at the crazy spectacle. Others, described as “too jacked up for anything but a desk, a pen, a telephone” walk by the sensation without looking. These non-watchers couldn’t interrupt their routine to look up.
I often find myself, like the non-watchers, stuck in a preconception.
Corrigan and Corrigan’s brother struggle with reconciling their assumptions of how the world should be, with how the world actually is. Corrigan excels at seeing the humanity in others, but he can’t accept his own human desires. Corrigan’s brother is more attune to himself, but can’t always see beyond a person’s rough outer layer to the real person within.
It is a constant struggle to remind ourselves to look beyond what we want to see, beyond that first layer. After all, you never know when you’ll see something as novel as man on a tightrope way up in the sky or palm trees in Dublin.
