Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living

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."

Table of 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

About the Author :
Mark C. Taylor is professor of religion and chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His most recent books are Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill; Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy; Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo; After God; Mystic Bones; and Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption.