In the fall of 2005, Mark C. Taylor, the controversial public intellectual and widely respected scholar, suddenly fell critically ill. For two days a team of forty doctors, many of whom thought he would not live, fought to save him. Taylor would eventually recover, but only to face a new threat: surgery for cancer. "These experiences have changed me in ways I am still struggling to understand," Taylor writes in this absorbing memoir. "After the past year, I am persuaded that I have done enough fieldwork to write a book that combines philosophical and theological reflection with autobiographical narrative. Writing is not only possible but actually seems necessary." Field Notes from Elsewhere is Taylor's unforgettable, inverted journey from death to life. Each of his memoir's fifty-two chapters and accompanying photographs recounts a morning-to-evening experience with sickness and convalescence, mingling humor and hope with a deep exploration of human frailty and, conversely, resilience. When we confront the end of life, Taylor explains, the axis of the lived world shifts, and everything must be reevaluated. As Taylor sorts through his remembrances, much that once seemed familiar becomes strange, paradoxical, and contradictory. He reads his experience with and against ghosts from his past, recasting the meaning of mortality, sacrifice, solitude, and abandonment, along with a host of other issues, in light of modern ways of dying. "You never come back from elsewhere," Taylor concludes, "because elsewhere always comes back with you." Reviews: "Mark Taylor's Field Notes from Elsewhere is an intoxicating whirl of a book, an engine of thought and feeling that touches on everything that counts most to us: living and dying, families, faith, friendship, and the quest to ground oneself in the real. To the best of my knowledge, it is a work without precedent." — Paul Auster, author of The New York Trilogy, among other novels "Mark Taylor is without peer as the most important postmodern secular theologian working today. This new work is beautiful and brilliant, moving and powerful in the extreme, always smart, and often deeply insightful. I found that I could not put it down." — David Miller, Syracuse University "In olden days it was not all that rare for a person to die and miraculously return to tell what they experienced in that journey to the Other world. Unlike Dante's Divine Comedy, which represents a journey predictably and orderly, Mark Taylor's personal version of the space of death is anything but. Shocked witless but playing it cool with family and Kierkegaard as his spirit-allies, the past and all that makes life is treasured, measured, realigned, demolished, and above all seen anew, thanks to the terrible closeness of the grim reaper from whom Taylor broke free so as to liberate philosophy and divinity itself." — Michael Taussig, Columbia University "Mark Taylor has been a magisterial but impersonal presence in his pathbreaking work on art, religion, and the ebbing of modernity. In Field Notes from Elsewhere, he takes us out of the library and into his life in a series of death-haunted meditations. Neither a summation nor a memoir, Field Notes from Elsewhere is an epilogue offered, provocatively, as the prologue to a sequel that someone other than Taylor must write." — Jack Miles, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for God: A Biography Contents: Day / Night Beginning / Origin Elsewhere / Silence Reflections / Reticence Premonitions / Postcards Home / Afterlife Stealth / Sacrifice Killing / Elemental Abandonment / Mortality Displacement / Place Creativity / Thinking E/Mergence / Emptiness Walls / Garden Painting / Play Perhaps / Numbers Pleasure / Money Vocation / Teaching Last / Burial Solitude / Loneliness Things / Ghosts Levity / Grief Humor / Monsters Faction / Dishonesty Inheritance / Withholding Letting Go / Dinnertime Compassion / Suffering Clouds / Waiting Freedom / Terror Forgiveness / Cruelty Daughters / Obsession Failure / Success Balance / Simplicity Face / Aging Stigma / Autoimmunity Patience / Chronicity Technology / Addiction Pain / Intimacy Blindness / Aura Cancer / Surviving Trust / Bitterness Hands / Will Secrets / Tripping Strangers / Tips Sharing / Fatigue Idleness / Guilt Driving / Accident Imperfection / Vulnerability Friendship / Doubt Love / Fidelity Hope / Despair Happiness / Melancholy Ordinary / Extraordinary Notes Acknowledgments |