The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos by Laura U. Marks (review)

In The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos, Laura U. Marks presents a compelling way of understanding how we experience the modern world. She calls this understanding a cosmology, a term as evocative of her project’s scope as it is purposefully anachronistic. Whereas the medieval cosmologies that Marks evokes have concentric circles separating the firmament from the celestial, Marks’s cosmology has squiggles representing folds separating the observer from the infinite (83). There is a playful aspect to all of this, which I believe is intentional. Marks sets an ambitious task for herself to create “a book of practical philosophy about living in a folded cosmos” (5), and that playfulness keeps her book much more accessible than it could otherwise be. Marks lives up to that ambition, resulting in a convincing argument for paying close attention to affective and sensuous experience as the first step in recognizing and appreciating the complexities of the world.