Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill [Hardcover]

Mark C. Taylor is professor of religion at Columbia University. His Columbia University Press books include Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo (2013); Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy (2012); and Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living (2009).Mark C. Taylor recounts a poignant love affair not with a person but with a place that, paradoxically, cannot be easily localized. For many years, Taylor has lived in the Berkshire Mountains, where he writes and creates land art and sculpture. In a world of mobile screens and virtual realities, where speed is the measure of success and place is disappearing, his work slows down thought and brings life back to earth to give readers time to ponder the importance of place before it slips away.

Taylor extends reflection beyond the page and returns with new insights about what is hiding in plain sight all around us. Weaving together words and images, his artful work enacts what it describes. Things long familiar suddenly appear strange, and the strange, unexpected, and unprogrammed unsettle readers in surprising ways. This timely meditation gives pause in the midst of harried lives and turns attention toward what we usually overlook: night, silence, touch, grace, ghosts, water, earth, stones, bones, idleness, infinity, slowness, and contentment. Recovering Place is a unique work with reflections that linger long after the book is closed.Taylor engages—by modeling it in language as well as in earth and water—his readers' desire for an earthen transcendence.Taylor is not limited by fields of research and study—he turns over ideas and regards objects and effects from all sides. His deep reading of philosophy, political theory, and sociology is combined with a unique understanding of art in its most eleml“W