Field Notes from Elsewhere : Reflections on Dying and Living / Mark Taylor.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Taylor, Mark, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Taylor, Mark C., 1945-.

Taylor, Mark C.

Death.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (307 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Columbia University Press, [2009]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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."

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

1. Day / Night

2. Beginning / Origin

3. Elsewhere / Silence

4. Reflections / Reticence

5. Premonitions / Postcards

6. Home / Afterlife

7. Stealth / Sacrifice

8. Killing / Elemental

9. Abandonment / Mortality

10. Displacement / Place

11. Creativity / Thinking

12. E/Mergence / Emptiness

13. Walls / Garden

14. Painting / Play

15. Perhaps / Numbers

16. Pleasure / Money

17. Vocation / Teaching

18. Last / Burial

19. Solitude / Loneliness

20. Things / Ghosts

21. Levity / Grief

22. Humor / Monsters

23. Faction / Dishonesty

24. Inheritance / Withholding

25. Letting Go / Dinnertime

26. Compassion / Suffering

27. Clouds / Waiting

28. Freedom / Terror

29. Forgiveness / Cruelty

30. Daughters / Obsession

31. Failure / Success

32. Balance / Simplicity

33. Face / Aging

34. Stigma / Autoimmunity

35. Patience / Chronicity

36. Technology / Addiction

37. Pain / Intimacy

38. Blindness / Aura

39. Cancer / Surviving

40. Trust / Bitterness

41. Hands / Will

42. Secrets / Tripping

43. Strangers / Tips

44. Sharing / Fatigue

45. Idleness / Guilt

46. Driving / Accident

47. Imperfection / Vulnerability

48. Friendship / Doubt

49. Love / Fidelity

50. Hope / Despair

51. Happiness / Melancholy

52. Ordinary / Extraordinary

Notes

Acknowledgments

Also by Mark C. Taylor

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9780231520034

0231520034

OCLC:

831121355