Sunday, January 23, 2011

Went to Mount Vernon and Monticello


Mount Vernon and Monticello feel like self portraits in architecture. Even though both are pickled in shrine, you still get a sense of the men who built them and a whiff of their time. But I constantly thought about the slaves they kept. And as my wife noted in the Monticello bookstore, they had every imaginable book on Jefferson, but NOT the pulitzer prize winning "The Hemmings of Monicello". I watched a guy buy an eight hundred dollar wine rack that was a replica of something Jefferson designed... and had his slaves build.