“ No matter how long you work, it’s always going to end sometime. And there’s always going to be things left undone. And it wouldn’t matter if you lived until you were 75. There would still be new ideas. There would still be things that you wished you would have accomplished … Part of the reason that I’m not having trouble facing the reality of death is that it’s not a limitation, in a way. It could have happened any time, and it is going to happen sometime. If you live your life according to that, death is irrelevant. Everything I’m doing right now is exactly what I want to do.
Keith Haring, Rolling Stone (August 10, 1989). The clarity with which Haring closes this interview is both inspiring and tragic. I do think we’re a death-fixated culture — ours is an obsession that fuels rigid religiosities, notions of “legacy” and monolithic identities, and the rush to supplement and enhance our physical natures in an attempt to convince us that we’re that much closer to living forever, among other things — so Haring’s introspection seems pointed. What he’s trying to say, I think, is this: An active resistance to death, which is inevitable, can actually become an active resistance to living if we let it. Haring died eight months after giving this interview, at the age of 31. (via nervousacid)