Riposte Card No. 15: Mortal meringues!
Or, Muriel Spark by Gwendolyn Le Cunff
Was there a better-named writer in the last century than Muriel Spark? With a moniker like that, she’s in a nominative determinism tie with Quentin Crisp.
And so it was a pleasure when Gwendolyn Le Cunff, Montreal illustrator and tattoo artist, selected the following quotation to be May’s Riposte Card:
“Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”
— Muriel Spark
The line comes from Memento Mori, one of Spark’s early books that has a morbidly delicious plot: One by one, a group of elderly friends and acquaintances gets a mysterious call with a simple message — “Remember you must die.” In other words, memento mori. Police are called, reactions differ, and (spoiler alert), death comes for us all.
Here’s the full quotation from the mouth of her character Henry Mortimer:
“If I had my life 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.”
My Founding Subscribers received three copies of the winning card in the mail, and prints are still available to any naive souls who believe themselves immortal, provided they can pay up!
And here’s Le Cunff’s obligatory Riposte Questionnaire:
What's your go-to item in a well-stocked stationery store?
I will literally look at everything and spend so much time there, but I guess the brush pens and/or the cardstock paper.
Where do you go for inspiration and/or information?
One thing I like to do when I'm not working on a specific project is to go down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, starting with a random subject and following along the different links. Otherwise, going to the arts section of a bookstore is always fun (and dangerous for my wallet).
Is there one joke, witticism, or aphorism you live by?
I found it in a fortune cookie and it stayed with me: “He who hurries cannot walk with dignity.”
What’s the best thing to put on toast?
My adult answer is salted butter but my childhood answer is butter and cocoa powder.
What work are you most proud of, and how can people support it?
I am starting to work on more projects in editorial illustration and really love it, so I hope I'll keep having more of them! In parallel, I started a journey in tattooing and it makes me think differently about what to draw, which is inspiring.
So if you need an editorial illustration or feel like getting inked, hit me up :)
And here’s the gorgeous book jacket for the 1964 U.S. edition, by the way:
