Over the past day or so I have been reading The Art of Death by Nigel Llewellyn. His work is pretty in tune with what my work is about and this morning I came across a really interesting piece of text that I am going to share:
“To some extent, contemporary capitalist cultures in the West still recognize that dying exists as a liminal point between life and death: we mostly agree on the good sense of preparing a will, a process which demands that we imagine the social world in our absence and which in a way foretells our own deaths. Most of us change our behaviour when someone close to us dies. Nevertheless, in the Western world death takes place at a distance, it is a pollutant which threatens hygiene; it indicates a time requiring strength, not emotions: death ignored might also be death denied. In early modern England such denial was unfamiliar if not impossible and the clerics preached the wickedness of those who disregarded their own mortality. In response, the space between life and death, the ritualized period of dying, was stretched in ways which today’s standards would be considered tasteless and unacceptable.”
(The Art of Death, Nigel Llewellyn, P.16)
This piece of text has me thinking about the difference between rituals today and rituals in the past, the ideals seem to be completely contrasting of each other. Before we embraced death and saw it as a humbling event and now we disregard death almost to the point of denial. When did this unhealthy attitude towards death in the West occur? As modern science has progressed and people’s day to day lives have become more sanitised, people have become more distanced from nature in general and death is just another unsanitary act that reminds us of our mortality. Which in this modern age is looked upon more as a failure to achieve immortality or a failure of medicine than a natural celebrated event that happens within every life.
