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Living in the World as if it Were Home
Written over a nine-year span, Living In The World As If It Were Home is a careful, exquisite look at the human desire to share a home with long grass, rivers, and stones, by poet Tim Lilburn. Lilburn's collection of essays plots the work required to roughly re-establish the conditions of Paradise; it explores the world of prairies rivers, aspen-covered sandhills, deer country, big lakes taking on their first ice in late October, the moon rising over chokecherry thickets, and asks: How to be here? There's nothing glib about the answer Lilburn offers as he says in one of his poems: The way back will be hard, ghost road through the rooms of sorrow/moon of contemplation on our backs. Though hard, however, the way is readily available: plain delight, he believes, knows the way. But the project to live in the world as though it were home requires the recovery of the full resources of human desire. The muscle of eros needs to be made strong.
- GenresPoetryPhilosophyEssays
135 pages, Paperback
First published November 11, 2002
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About the author
Tim Lilburn
25 books15 followersTim Lilburn is the author of six books of poetry, including the Governor Generals Award-winning collection Kill-Site. He is also the author of a book of essays, Living in the World as if It Were Home, and the editor of two anthologies, Thinking and Singing and Poetry and Knowing.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 25, 2019
The desire to know the world behind its names is the death of knowing that is objective, ordering, communicable and of the apparently secure life that rests on such knowing. p13
How does one address what falls outside reason's caricatures, that eludes languages efforts to circumscribe...? Here naming may be nothing more than ovation...or a slight domestication of being in which which we participate with what is beyond us, enjoy a brief contiguity with that uncontainability, like feeding birds in winter. p 62
One cannot bludgeon one's way into that presence without destroying its virtue, compromising the delicate balance which allows us to exist in forms and ways we barely comprehend. This entails the withholding of judgmental attitudes and the cultivation of an appreciation and respect for the other as an approach to living. For Lilburn, this is very much a cross species endeavour, and one is also required to withdraw in order to advance.
Eros must be freed from the belittling impulse to convert the world into something useful or consoling and be brought to expend itself in its true delight: the contemplative look.
.....It requires a cognitive humility, a deference to the significance of being.......
Contemplation of the branch means letting it be nothing more than what it really is, unqualified by intellect, almost eerie in its complete otherness In contemplation, marvelling and questing to know is knowing. p35
Galileos primary qualities and Descartes properties of extension are not capable of arousing awe and tenderness. p74
Somehow, Lilburn does this. At first I struggled with the archaic and awkward words he introduces to illustrate the finer points of his meaning. I do hate having to constantly run to the dictionary. And I dislike the impotent feeling of not quite getting the historical context or some references; the awareness of my ignorance is humiliating. That might be a prerequisite for Lilburn . I get comfortable with the new words and begin to realize how they express something I have never been able to articulate to anyone and thought peculiar to myself. I am flooded with ziggernauts of tenderness and delight.
There is a singing in things, he declares on p75. To hear this, one needs to be still to listen. One needs to lie down on the grass and let go of time.
It is a form of knowing that strains across the distance between mind and world and aims to end in union with what it seeks. p16
This book is ultimately a meditation on being; a contemplation of contemplation, and our place in the cosmos, our longing and our resistance to being transformed.
For moral reasons, a new depiction of the world is required.....p74
TL is a pioneer of that world. I feel at home.
How does one address what falls outside reason's caricatures, that eludes languages efforts to circumscribe...? Here naming may be nothing more than ovation...or a slight domestication of being in which which we participate with what is beyond us, enjoy a brief contiguity with that uncontainability, like feeding birds in winter. p 62
One cannot bludgeon one's way into that presence without destroying its virtue, compromising the delicate balance which allows us to exist in forms and ways we barely comprehend. This entails the withholding of judgmental attitudes and the cultivation of an appreciation and respect for the other as an approach to living. For Lilburn, this is very much a cross species endeavour, and one is also required to withdraw in order to advance.
Eros must be freed from the belittling impulse to convert the world into something useful or consoling and be brought to expend itself in its true delight: the contemplative look.
.....It requires a cognitive humility, a deference to the significance of being.......
Contemplation of the branch means letting it be nothing more than what it really is, unqualified by intellect, almost eerie in its complete otherness In contemplation, marvelling and questing to know is knowing. p35
Galileos primary qualities and Descartes properties of extension are not capable of arousing awe and tenderness. p74
Somehow, Lilburn does this. At first I struggled with the archaic and awkward words he introduces to illustrate the finer points of his meaning. I do hate having to constantly run to the dictionary. And I dislike the impotent feeling of not quite getting the historical context or some references; the awareness of my ignorance is humiliating. That might be a prerequisite for Lilburn . I get comfortable with the new words and begin to realize how they express something I have never been able to articulate to anyone and thought peculiar to myself. I am flooded with ziggernauts of tenderness and delight.
There is a singing in things, he declares on p75. To hear this, one needs to be still to listen. One needs to lie down on the grass and let go of time.
It is a form of knowing that strains across the distance between mind and world and aims to end in union with what it seeks. p16
This book is ultimately a meditation on being; a contemplation of contemplation, and our place in the cosmos, our longing and our resistance to being transformed.
For moral reasons, a new depiction of the world is required.....p74
TL is a pioneer of that world. I feel at home.
February 23, 2024
A dense read, but so rich, and so rewarding. Lilburn borrows from ancient monastic thinking to try to understand what it means to be in, to exist with, the (natural) world; to think about desire, and wonder. This is philosophy in the best sense – deep, earnest, urgent contemplation.
Perhaps I just picked up this book at the right time, but I found it incredible, remarkable. (Perhaps slightly repetitive, but still remarkable.) It tapped into a lot of questions I’ve been mulling over. At times the writing, and the thoughts developed in it, are simply astonishing. And often deliriously poetic.
The basic thrust is that there is a distance between us and the world that becomes ever more apparent the more we desire to know it, the more we try to understand and "be with" the world. Our attempts to bridge that distance are constantly, inevitably frustrated. Lilburn susses out a way to reconcile these two things (the desire and the separation) – which is to recognize that we will never know, and yet to continue to desire despite this. The grief of knowing that we will never know is, in itself, true understanding.
Only he says is better.
*
"Contemplation of nature … is a knowing which is an unknowing, a frustration of the desire to know in which, nevertheless, this desire persists, heightened, hurtling one forward into the unknowability of unique things. The knowing of discrete things, these sandhills, the rose hollows, chokecherry tufts dark in snow, the deer, is a not-knowing of them, a humbling of the mind's workaday cravings for fixity, certitude, while one persists in desiring to know them."
"Look long enough, faithfully enough at the tree, your seeing a bowing before it, let the deer's stare seep deeply into you, and you lose your name. Eventually a contemplative stance toward the world comes to mourning. Weep at your separation from what is; the mind as prodigal touches bottom and in its recognition of its poverty recovers itself. One does miss the homeland of being where one is. Such mourning, however, is perhaps what knowing the world and being in it, with awareness, is."
"But what is union with something that can't be known…? It is a standing alongside, an affective nudging against, a dwelling-at-a-distance-with, a beating with a naked intent. The thisness of the nearest doe bent over the juniper, her transfixing oddness, is the littling of language, mortification of the desire for clarity, yet an occasion of the love which is one shape of contemplative attention. The eros to know the deer, as you encounter her unknowable particularity, resolves itself into – fails into - a pressing, unrequited fondness that waits before her; this knowledge is the beginning of fidelity, a bedding down with things. It is mind finding a frail home in the garden of otherness."
"I want the rest that such recognition would spread along the whole muscle of self."
"The world, low hills, grass, clay banks of rivers, geese, rivers flowing east, late afternoon light, is a single thing, is divinity ambling out of itself."
"But the homelessness of protean desire is the only human home: the restlessness, the self-sundering, the displacement – all this off-centredness, this reeling – is the one graceful movement."
"Having no home, while bending into the world where one would live as if it were home, is the human home. … The experience of moving erotic homelessness is us in the world as the grass is the grass and the river is itself."
Perhaps I just picked up this book at the right time, but I found it incredible, remarkable. (Perhaps slightly repetitive, but still remarkable.) It tapped into a lot of questions I’ve been mulling over. At times the writing, and the thoughts developed in it, are simply astonishing. And often deliriously poetic.
The basic thrust is that there is a distance between us and the world that becomes ever more apparent the more we desire to know it, the more we try to understand and "be with" the world. Our attempts to bridge that distance are constantly, inevitably frustrated. Lilburn susses out a way to reconcile these two things (the desire and the separation) – which is to recognize that we will never know, and yet to continue to desire despite this. The grief of knowing that we will never know is, in itself, true understanding.
Only he says is better.
*
"Contemplation of nature … is a knowing which is an unknowing, a frustration of the desire to know in which, nevertheless, this desire persists, heightened, hurtling one forward into the unknowability of unique things. The knowing of discrete things, these sandhills, the rose hollows, chokecherry tufts dark in snow, the deer, is a not-knowing of them, a humbling of the mind's workaday cravings for fixity, certitude, while one persists in desiring to know them."
"Look long enough, faithfully enough at the tree, your seeing a bowing before it, let the deer's stare seep deeply into you, and you lose your name. Eventually a contemplative stance toward the world comes to mourning. Weep at your separation from what is; the mind as prodigal touches bottom and in its recognition of its poverty recovers itself. One does miss the homeland of being where one is. Such mourning, however, is perhaps what knowing the world and being in it, with awareness, is."
"But what is union with something that can't be known…? It is a standing alongside, an affective nudging against, a dwelling-at-a-distance-with, a beating with a naked intent. The thisness of the nearest doe bent over the juniper, her transfixing oddness, is the littling of language, mortification of the desire for clarity, yet an occasion of the love which is one shape of contemplative attention. The eros to know the deer, as you encounter her unknowable particularity, resolves itself into – fails into - a pressing, unrequited fondness that waits before her; this knowledge is the beginning of fidelity, a bedding down with things. It is mind finding a frail home in the garden of otherness."
"I want the rest that such recognition would spread along the whole muscle of self."
"The world, low hills, grass, clay banks of rivers, geese, rivers flowing east, late afternoon light, is a single thing, is divinity ambling out of itself."
"But the homelessness of protean desire is the only human home: the restlessness, the self-sundering, the displacement – all this off-centredness, this reeling – is the one graceful movement."
"Having no home, while bending into the world where one would live as if it were home, is the human home. … The experience of moving erotic homelessness is us in the world as the grass is the grass and the river is itself."
January 7, 2026
Beautiful and poignant
October 24, 2018
Beautiful, grounded, spiritual writing, with deep roots in Western traditions. For all the wisdom and beauty of its elegant meditations, it's strength is not a connection with indigenous senses of the land. This makes it a book wrestling with the alienation of Christian tradition itself, which it does with strength and some spiritual sweat. Wonderful.
August 19, 2020
Lilburn’s prose is intimate and at once so quietly moving. The longing and ache to love and to know the world speaks to me in ways I never imagine text could. I’ve gone through Thoreau and other texts, but none resonated with me as much as this. I wish more people would come to know of him.
December 21, 2024
I will read this again and again. Each time it brings me closer in to home. A deepening treasure.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews