Memento Mori

"Remember that you must die."

I just finished reading Memento Mori by Muriel Spark. It has a retired detective, a parlor investigation, a murder and sinister telephone calls, but it is not a detective mystery except in the deeper sense that it is concerned with the mystery of death. As the retired inspector says:

"If I had my life to live over again, I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death . I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practise which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs."

"....The words, 'Remember you must die.' It is, you know, an excellent thing to remember this, for it is nothing more than the truth. To remember one's death is, in short, a way of life."

"To come to the point---" said Godfrey.

"Godfrey," said Charmian. "I am sure everyone is fascinated by what Henry is saying."

I enjoyed the book much more than I thought I would. It concerns the lives and secret, tangled pasts of a group of elderly English people, and their dealings to avoid or confront the thought of death. I found that I could identify in bits and pieces with the more "touchstone" characters, but even those are kept at a distance. There was a purgatorial, discomposed air to the episodes. The style was what I think they call "mordant" (I've always wanted to use that word somewhere).... precise, lowkey, with an edge to it.

Muriel Spark was Scottish, and a convert to Catholicism, according to Wikipedia. Evelyn Waugh encouraged her to write, Graham Greene enjoyed her writing. Penelope Fitzgerald, a novelist and contemporary, said that she:

"had pointed out that it wasn't until she became a Roman Catholic ... that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do." ......

Spark said of her conversion and its effect on her writing:

"I was just a little worried, tentative. Would it be right, would it not be right? Can I write a novel about that — would it be foolish, wouldn't it be? And somehow with my religion — whether one has anything to do with the other, I don't know - but it does seem so, that I just gained confidence…"