I go to a school with a MANSION on campus.
It's random. And awesome!
So last Friday we toured the Belmont Mansion. It was my 4th tour but I feel like almost everything I learned was new! Unbelievable!
Something that struck me during our time there was the "obsession" with death that permeated the house and that. It seemed like a strange decorating theme of sorts....paintings of dead relatives, weird little artifacts made from dead relatives' hair. I had never really thought about it before, but as our tour guide pointed out, the mortality rates back in the old days were way higher than now and consequently people dealt with death in a very different way than we do today.
I think death was revered and even understood in a way that we don't comprehend in today's culture. Today death is an avoided topic of conversation. It's sad and scary and uncomfortable. We avoid it. This was obvious in how we reacted to the death-related artifacts all throughout the mansion. They were weird!
It was interesting to see how art and artifacts have documented the way that cultural perspectives of death have changed through the years.
