'Let the Great World Spin' at the end talks a lot about connections and light and possibility and the fact that the world doesn't end. Even in the darkest times, we have to go on.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The thing about the end of the world is that not just the West collapses, the whole world does.
Most of 'Let the Great World Spin' is centered on the day in 1974 when Philippe Petit walked on a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center, creating an astonishing spectacle that intersects with the lives of many of the novel's multiple protagonists.
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
Before this address to my countrymen is closed, I beg leave to observe, that as a new century has dawned upon us, the mind is naturally led ot contemplate the great events that have run parallel with and have just closed the last.
If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.
If one wants to talk about the end of the world, the apocalypse, you're talking about the world itself. It's not Southern California breaking into the sea. The story is global, and it requires that kind of approach.
We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act.
The world ultimately is what we say it is.
For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement.