Katherine Rundell finds it on the tightrope:
I first taught myself to tightrope walk in high heels because I once saw a woman do it in a circus tent with silver curtains. She wore a black cocktail dress, tattoo sleeves and stiletto boots. She had the kind of confidence you expect in army generals and minor prophets. She carried no pole. It wasn’t in her interest to make it look easy, and she made it look the best and most tempting level of difficult; somewhere below war, marriage and religion but above everything else. To provide razzle-dazzle and manufacture tension two circus hands had scattered broken glass on the ground underneath the wire, but it wasn’t necessary; we hadn’t come for the danger, but to see something vertiginous and counter-intuitive performed with insouciance by a beautiful woman. …
These recklessly, riotously brave people, I think, do us a service: they show us humans have something vertiginous and tenacious in our blood.
The Dish 