The key to action is getting down to it
ALAIN
Taking the first step: anxiety of all lovers, nightmare of all tightrope walkers. “I wouldn’t be able to walk on that wire if I wasn’t sure before taking the first step that I could do the last . . . It’s very close to religious faith.” Who’s saying this? Philippe Petit. Who’s Philippe Petit? The best way of introducing him would be to make you feel what he does. So let me suggest a little thought experiment. At the end of this paragraph I want you to close your eyes, count to ten, and open them again. Here we go.
You open your eyes and all around you is sky. A bird glides somewhere on the edge of your vision, way up high. What’s that deafening sound? It’s your heart. There’s a trembling in your legs. You look down. There at your feet—a giddying drop. You’re right on the edge of the void. You lean out to take a look around. Four hundred and ten meters below you, almost half a kilometer, the length of four soccer pitches end to end, a hundred meters more than the Eiffel Tower, six times the height of Notre-Dame, your eye meets the ground. Where, perhaps, if you’re not very careful . . . Where’s that wind coming from? It’s the wind of your thoughts. The only wind that could topple you. You lift your head, look straight ahead. The line of your sight follows the line you’re about to walk across. Because you’re going to walk across this rope that’s slung more than 400 meters above the ground, this rope, or, rather, cable, sixty meters long, that you spent the night stretching out, in top secret, with your accomplices, Jean-François, Jean-Louis, and Albert, between the two towers you’ve been dreaming of for years now, two towers you’ve sworn you’ll walk between one day. One morning. This morning. It’s not yet 7 o’clock, it’s August 7, 1974, and far beneath you, miniature workers are returning to their offices, crossing paths with the night shift as they return to their beds, and you’re all alone up here, preparing to return to your rope. New York is waking, but you haven’t slept all night. Ready? Are we ever ready for a stunt like this? You’re about to cross the void between the Twin Towers of the newly built World Trade Center. After years of preparation, hesitation, and organization, your hour has finally come. Right now you’re Philippe Petit, but once you’ve taken your first step, you’ll be the tightrope walker.
The conditions are far from ideal. There are clouds. It could rain. Perhaps a bit too much wind. It’s so high. In Traité du funambulisme (On the High Wire), Philippe Petit says: “You must not hesitate. Nor should you be conscious of the ground. That is both stupid and dangerous.” Will the cable hold? Should you reschedule, put it off? Impossible. In one minute the elevators will start working, in two minutes the first workers will arrive on the roof. The police will not be far behind. There’s the elevator wheel starting up. Your friend and accomplice Jean-François, who could get arrested and imprisoned for helping you, gives you a look, and hands you the 55-pound pole you need to make your crossing. You can’t turn back now.
OK. Place your left foot delicately on the rope. Your weight should remain on your supporting leg, the straight one, that’s still planted on the solid ground of the south tower, safely on the building. Now you have to shift the weight of this leg onto the other one, taking the first step onto the rope. There comes a moment where you have to decide. The first step is a point of no return.
The first step is terrifying. Impossible. You think back to the first time you saw the towers. It was six years ago, a photo in a magazine in the dentist’s waiting room. You ripped out the page and left without having your tooth pulled, running off with your treasure. The towers didn’t exist yet, but you could dream them up. The second time you saw them it wasn’t in a photo, but for real. From down below, obviously. Their mass, their density, their great threatening height. The photo had set you dreaming, but the reality crushed you. Every fiber of your muscles, every cell in your body, every shudder of your skin cried out, in that silent language you understand better than anyone, that it was impossible. Besides, despite all these months of preparation, it’s still impossible. Which is why (and this too you understand better than anyone else in the world) you’re going to do it. But not just any which way. Your first step has to be right. Or it could be your last. “The mistake is to leave without hope, without pride, to throw yourself into a routine you know will fail.” Once the dice are thrown, it’s too late to go back. Everything is determined in advance, in how you throw them, how you throw yourself into it. It all depends on the hope you put into it. The pride. And this pride isn’t really a thought, it’s a position, a way of standing tall in the face of the world. It’s not a thought that you have, it’s a thought that you are. A thought that in fact spares you the trouble of thinking. Because if you think about it for a moment, it’s a crazy idea, to risk your life on a rope stretched between the two highest towers in the world. That’s exactly what it is. The tightrope walker is an idea up in the air, hanging by a thread, hanging by faith alone. “When I step onto the rope, I do it with a sense of certainty.” Where does this certainty come from? Hours of training, of course, of meticulous preparation, confidence in the strength of your legs, the skill of your feet. But deep down, it comes from nowhere. The tightrope walker’s certainty is in fact arrogance, innocence, or madness. A faith without God. Faith in the gods in his legs and his feet. Pure faith.
Just one more moment before you step out. Be careful how you start. Even beyond the question of life or death, the style of your first step determines the style of the whole crossing.
To put your whole foot on the wire all at once produces a sure though heavy kind of walking, but if you first slide your toes, then your sole, and finally your heel onto the wire, you will be able to experience the intoxicating lightness that is so magnificent at great heights. And then people will say of you: “He is strolling on his wire!”
This is the heart of it: to give the impression that you’re simply going for a walk, easy does it, when in fact you’re walking on a rope 110 floors up. You’re a metaphor, an inspiration, a dream come true. You’re living the dreams that are dormant in those humans down below. To accomplish a dream, you need the lightness of a dream. So be very careful with that first step.
As we’ve seen, once you’ve started, you just need to keep going. The stones you’ve laid in a wall give you the shape of the stones you’re going to have to put in next. The more the wall grows, the less room there is for hesitation or chance, the more you are bound by necessity. But how can you dare to start? Laying the first stone may be no big deal, but taking the first step . . . Freedom is dizzying, and the infinity of possible outcomes is a promise of failure, a sky without stars, a metaphysical void studded only with questions: why do this and not that? Why go this way, not that? At least a tightrope walker knows which way he must go. Straight ahead. Sixty meters of cable. The route is laid out. He hesitates not over the direction, but over how to take the first step. No more choices after that. This is not the case in all activities, obviously. The tightrope walker is an extreme case, a metaphor for all the rest. The way you start, in whatever field of activity, contains the seed of future success or failure. It’s not enough just to set out—you have to set out confidently. Whether in horse riding, running, work, or love, the first step dictates whatever comes next. If you set out confidently your chances of achieving your goal are infinitely greater. A bit like in archery: an arrow that is fired cleanly has already hit the bull’s-eye; its flight is already accomplished at the instant it leaves the bow. This is not a matter of predestination: until the moment it’s released, the arrow is going nowhere. Nothing is laid out in advance, but the endpoint of an arrow’s flight is inscribed in its beginning, and for the archer there is a way of beginning the movement that guarantees it will end well. To start out well is to end well, in the same movement. You mustn’t try. You must succeed the first time. And therefore, until you feel the presence of the endpoint, until you feel you’ve reached it, you can’t actually begin. You could, you should, but still you hesitate.
Indecision, Descartes used to say, is the worst of all evils. How is it to be avoided? André Gide, another great admirer of Stendhal, wrote in his diary: “Stendhal’s great secret, his special trick, was to write straight off . . . This gave his writing a certain wide-awake, ‘got-it-first-time’ quality, something unexpected and sudden . . . If we hesitate, we are lost.” A profound remark. We do not hesitate because we are lost, but are lost because we hesitate. You’re really lost not when you don’t know where you are, but when you don’t know what to do next. It’s easy to see why Stendhal fascinates writers so much. They all understand how hard it is to start, and there he goes, throwing himself at the ink without a moment’s hesitation. As Napoleon threw himself into battle. Or as you must throw yourself into the water to learn to swim. Walking, in the same way, involves setting off, beginning to fall, correcting the fall to convert it into energy and then into a forward movement. In order to learn to walk, you need to risk a fall, to set out without hesitation.
That’s all well and good, but if you did get lost, in a forest, for example, with no signal, no signposts, and no directions, wouldn’t you hesitate? Descartes suggests in his Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method) that when a person’s understanding has no impact on their will, the best thing is to imitate
those who, on finding themselves lost in a forest, don’t wander around in circles, this way and that, nor come to a halt in one particular spot, but just keep walking in the straightest line possible toward their given destination, refusing to change direction for unimportant reasons, particularly since it was only by chance they chose that destination in the first place: by this means, even if they don’t get to exactly the place they meant to, at least they will eventually get somewhere where the likelihood is they will be better off than in the middle of a forest.
When you really have to act, and you don’t know what to do, and have no way of finding out, it’s better to choose a random direction and stick to it than to turn back or stay put, hesitating indefinitely. In certain situations, choosing randomly is better than not choosing at all. It you choose to follow that direction you are only temporarily lost. In choosing, we find a way. Descartes: “My second maxim was to be as firm and resolute in my actions as I possibly could, and to follow dubious opinions, once I had made up my mind to do so, with as much vigor as if they had been convictions.” A strange recommendation, coming from a rationalist philosopher. What he is saying is that the content of a decision is unimportant, once you’ve decided it’s the right one. The truth of an opinion, however dubious, is unimportant, if you’re convinced it’s true . . . How could such a great thinker, a sworn enemy of prejudice, recommend such a renunciation of truth? It’s scandalous and absurd. You can’t simply decree that an opinion is true—you need first to examine it from every angle, weigh the pros and cons, take all the time you need, before affirming it. This is true in the realm of thought. But in the realm of action it’s false. In practice, time is short, my friends, the sun is setting, it’s going to rain, we’ve got no water, we must press on. In most cases it’s less a question of acting than it is of reacting—to circumstances, to events, or to other people. If you spend time weighing all the possible options you might take you will never act and it will always be too late. So it’s better, Descartes is telling us, to choose randomly than not to choose at all. What makes for a good decision is making it, and sticking to it, as if it were the best one possible. In that critical moment of action, it’s always the best one possible. Why? Just because. Once a decision has been made, it must be considered irrevocable. So you tell yourself there is no going back, no regretting, or, worst of all, changing your mind in midstream. The true enemy of action is doubt.
So you don’t begin an action because you’ve thought about it long enough to judge that it’s the best of all possible choices, but because indecision is the worst of all evils, and there just isn’t time to examine them all. Seen like this, beginning is the key to completing. It means forgetting about deliberation, hesitation, and calculation and just getting on with the job. Not tomorrow, not later: here and now. Don’t wait for the first of January to make your vows. Alain says: “Making a resolution means nothing; taking up a tool is what’s needed. The thought will follow. Consider that thought cannot guide an action that has not been embarked on.” So you don’t have to renounce all thought when you act, but you must think only inside the action, at its service, and only when necessary. Thought must be as light as possible, it must not trip you up. When it is regulated by action, thought is a powerful tool. Left to itself, and to doubt, it will be your scourge.
Of course, it would be infinitely preferable if we had the time and the capacity to weigh our choices exactly, like the philosopher Leibniz’s omniscient and decisive god, whom Voltaire makes fun of in Candide: the idea that He calculated all possibilities before bringing into existence “the best of all possible worlds.” But as humans we usually have to act without full knowledge. Why? Descartes explains clearly. When we consider God—by which I don’t mean the god of religion, the object of belief, but an ideal being who exists hypothetically—everything about him is infinite: his understanding (capacity for thought), his power (capacity of action), his will (capacity for affirming or denying). A perfect being can think all things, do all things, will all things: he is omniscient, omnipotent, and possesses infinite will. We poor mortals, on the other hand, are blessed only with finite understanding and finite power, but by some sort of miracle we enjoy, like God, infinite willpower. We can’t understand everything, or understand lots of different things at once; we can’t do everything; but we are free to wish for everything. Although we are metaphysically powerless, we have something of the infinite in us. This is why, even if we are by nature ignorant of the future, and incapable of considering all possible choices in advance, we can still make decisions and act. Alain, who is an intellectual descendant of Descartes, says this very clearly: “it is pointless to think about what one is going to do until one has begun. It would be like organizing a filing cabinet before you knew what papers you wanted to put in it. Or else, like wanting to know what you’re going to say before you say it.” And this last example is the best, because we find it shocking. Our thinking isn’t made to set out first; people who think out their actions never actually act. The Himalayan mountain climber can teach us something here; if he just sits looking at the mountain he will never find his way up it. “The reason I walk is to find out which way to go.”
It’s an immense paradox, but it’s also the real secret of all men and women of action: they do things precisely because they don’t know what they’re doing. They have a rough idea, of course, otherwise they’d never get going. But if they knew completely, they would no longer need to do it. They don’t act on knowledge; they act in order to acquire knowledge. They are their own first audience, as though they are observing their lives from the outside, even while steering them. The joy of action is in surprising oneself, in discovering both what is only possible because of action—a new path for the climber—as well as what the action reveals about oneself—courage, fear, etc. When we act, we are always the first to be surprised by the result of our action. This doesn’t mean we have to be passive. On the contrary, by paying attention to what is happening to me I can alter my course and make new decisions, just as a sailor constantly adjusts to the wind and the waves. Acting doesn’t mean making one large, irrevocable decision, but rather constantly making small decisions, according to the knowledge we either do or don’t have. To do is to never-stop-doing, and to always be trying to do better.
Surely, we might think, this contradicts Descartes’ recommendation that we should choose one opinion or direction, randomly if necessary, and never deviate. Is it better to decide on something once and for all and to stick with that decision no matter what, or should you constantly reevaluate your decisions, changing direction with the tide and flow of events? It depends. If all is dark around you, if you have no idea which way to go, then you must apply Descartes’ maxim: make a random choice and stick to it. But if you have a few clues about the situation, if, like a good sailor, you know how to read the wind by looking at the water, if you can make predictions based on your own understanding, then you must do what you have to do. To clarify, Alain takes this example, which is the best one I’ve found because of its shock value: I discover what I want to say, he says, when I open my mouth. This runs counter to our received ideas, and to the popular wisdom that says you should think before you speak for fear of saying something stupid. Is this tantamount to saying that before opening our mouths we should have no idea what we’re going to say? Not exactly. But speaking is an adventure too. An adventure in which we all constantly take part. When we start speaking, we often don’t know exactly what we’re going to say. And this isn’t a defect: it is in the very nature of the spoken word. That’s what speech is there for: to teach us what we think by making it real to us, and therefore open it to being redirected, modified, or corrected like any other living thing. The paradox here is that you mustn’t think too hard about what you’re going to say if you want to say it well. Anyone who thinks too much about what they’re going to say will fail to find the words for it, because they’ll be too busy looking for them. Thought tends to block words. Inversely, people who pay too little attention to what they say are likely to be carried away by the sounds of their words to the detriment of their meaning. In speaking, it is important both to let oneself go with the rhythm of the phrase one has begun, and to control its rhythm, in order to guide the flux of the words. Language must flow. And if the only way to say what you have to say is to find out in the saying, then you must first begin. Even when we think we know exactly what we mean to say, the way of actually saying it is discovered by speaking, with a certain nonchalance that is somewhere between sleepwalking and tightrope walking, maintaining a subtle balance between intention and meaning, out there on the rope.
Successful improvisation is thus a waking dream, and you must never think too hard about your idea if you want to express it. When you speak you must be careful of what you say—not fearfully, like children, who are told to think before they speak, nor like victims of omertà—but in the noble sense of the tightrope walker who advances along the rope without thinking too much about it, in case thinking makes him fall. Even if the rhythm of your speech pulls you along, it’s important not to get carried away by it. To talk is to surf on one’s words, which unfold just ahead like a wave, a wave that both carries us and threatens to submerge us. The speech of politicians is “wooden”—heavy, rigid, dead—whereas the heroes of the living word take their chances on as light and flexible a board as possible. People’s attention, when we speak, is not directed at something that already exists, but at a reality that is being formed at every step—every word—of the way, right in front of us. You get the idea: if we never spoke until we knew what we were going to say, we’d never begin a single sentence.
It’s exactly the same with living. There is no preparation for life. So you need to skip the warm-up. Watch your attitude. If you set off without a safety net, proudly, you learn how to live just as you learn how to ride a bike or a horse: by accepting the propulsion offered by life itself. Living like this is constantly surprising . . . OK, but in a good way or in a bad way? Nothing’s ever exactly what you thought it was going to be. You’re never adequately prepared. But the longer you hesitate, the harder it will be. Don’t wait until you’re sure before you act. What’s going to happen in the future? You’ll have to get there to find out.
Meanwhile, let us return to Philippe Petit, August 7, 1974—at the moment when the elevator wheel starts to turn, his friend Jean-François passes him his pole, and he has only a minute left in which to decide if—for all his tiredness and fear—he’s going to go for it, or not:
An inner howl assails me, the wild longing to flee.
But it is too late.
The wire is ready.
My heart is so forcibly pressed against that wire, each beat echoes, echoes and casts each approaching thought into the netherworld.
Decisively, my other foot sets itself onto the cable.
[ . . . ]
Inundated with astonishment, with sudden and extreme fear, yes, with great joy and pride, I hold myself in balance on the high wire. With ease.