PrintTry writing down everything that you find meaningful in life. Try doing it in four or five pages.
This is the project Mark Taylor, the chair of Columbia’s religion department, set for himself in 2006. After surviving septic shock and cancer surgery in the space of one year, Taylor felt a need to chronicle his thoughts. “I’d done enough research,” he explains.
The result of his exercise is “Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Living and Dying.” Though the final book weighs in at over 290 pages, Taylor’s goal of brevity is not unfulfilled.
In Taylor’s words, “Field Notes” combines “diary, family photo album, and a book of reflection.” Divided into 52 parts that each have an “A.M.” and a “P.M.” section, “Field Notes” is highly structured. Resonances among the chapters abound: the memoir begins with dawn and ends with evening, each chapter covers one week of the year, and each reflection covers one half of a day. Taylor uses this scaffold to construct oppositions—night/day, trust/bitterness, hope/despair—and explore the spaces between them.
It is in the exploration of these binaries that the book demonstrates its power and ingenuity. “Field Notes from Elsewhere” is more than a catchy title: It’s a place where the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary. “Part of what I try to get at is, people tend to deal with the world by setting up clear distinctions—order/chaos, black/white, self/other,” Taylor says. “What always intrigues me is what can’t be aligned with these distinctions. It seems to me that that’s where life is lived and stuff happens.”
Taylor developed this perspective during the time he spent in St. Luke’s cancer ward. Surrounded by other severely ill patients, he got accustomed to the horrors of the disease, becoming “not merely different but other.” As Taylor writes in “Field Notes,” “Once you have been elsewhere, you can never come back because elsewhere always returns with you.”
Dealing with that space, however, is never easy. When Taylor tries to tackle it using abstractions, he produces segments like this: “The other night is different; it is, paradoxically, within as well as beyond what we ordinarily know as day and night. Far from familiar, it is forever strange; never reassuring, it is endlessly fascinating.” Though Taylor is a strong critic of academic writing, his work does not entirely escape the abstruse nature of the interstices it treats.
Taylor does acknowledge this difficulty. In Chapter 42, he writes, “Are you still reading? I often wish I could step off the page to explain things by talking with you directly. But, I realize, this is an idle fantasy because all discourse is destined to be indirect.” He is right, and in the moments where the text forgets to ground itself, the writing suffers.
That said, when the book approaches “Elsewhere” through the lens of personal narrative, it succeeds in conveying a sense of that unusual dimension. Taylor’s account of his efforts to retrace the locations of his collapse into septic shock, for example, is stunningly beautiful. After describing in detail the way in which “the present was transformed … an echo I could not quite hear yet was unable to ignore,” Taylor earns a moment of abstraction: “I now understand what Kierkegaard meant when he described the knight of faith as making a double movement. First, there is the movement of infinite resignation … only then do you become free to reappropriate what you have given up by receiving life as a gift from an other you can never comprehend.” Though Taylor sometimes struggles to express his thoughts, they come through clearly when he describes his own journey.
The book’s meditations on art are just as successful as its personal recollections. When a chapter centers around a work of art, the difficulty of seizing “Elsewhere” disappears. In Chapter 52, for instance, Taylor combines his own words with a poem by Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” The mix of Taylor’s concrete images (“Drooping black-eyed susans,” “Pears left half eaten by deer and crow”) with Stevens’ lines (“The serious reflection is composed / Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace”) acutely expresses the intimate connection between quotidian and cosmic sensibilities. Taylor gives new meaning to Stevens’ words, successfully borrowing the poet’s observations to illuminate his return to life.
While drawing on art and personal experience are common writing techniques, incorporating family photographs is not. “Field Notes” contains dozens of images that range widely in age and subject, everything from snapshots of Taylor’s father’s baseball cap to the contours of his garden. Though they aren’t necessarily fodder for galleries in Chelsea, the images add layers of nostalgia and authenticity to Taylor’s anecdotes and enhance the chapters’ personal dimensions.
Despite its occasional moments of obliquity, “Field Notes” is a beautiful book. It’s rare that an academic speaks so frankly and with such intense focus about his own life. “The book will have succeeded,” Taylor says, if it “will help people negotiate their difficulties and whatnot. That’s the value of studying literature or art or philosophy.” Taylor has achieved what few scholars do: a synthesis of the personal and the abstract. His ruminations on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard become more insightful when juxtaposed against his personal experience. Columbia students struggling over texts in Butler should take heart in knowing “Field Notes” is a stirring validation that scholarly enterprises can connect with the real world.