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."
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