Sunday 8 November 2015

Clocks ticking


An artist dying in 1979. Can you imagine him living in the 80s? Can you imagine him living now? Christ, can you imagine him living one day longer? In retrospect, can you do that? Andrei Tarkovsky making films in the 90s, Christopher Hitchens twittering, David Foster Wallace writing a novel in 2015? This is oddly unthinkable. 

Same could be said for many people, granted, but it’s especially true for people of art. In a cruel and fateful way, an artist lives for as long as he is supposed to. And while that may sound desperate or possibly even religious, this is hardly a bad thing. It means eternity is constrained by time. And that’s a nice thought.