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Going Home: Essays
Tim Lilburn has long been recognized for his ability to explore issues of ecology from a variety of viewpoints — philosophical, moral, ethical, even poetic. This new collection expands on his thoughts in surprising and enlightening ways, concentrating on how we relate (often uneasily) to our physical landscape in Canada and the United States. Going Home is especially timely in a world where the whole of North America is waking up to the fact that our “home” is endangered because of how we live in it.
224 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2008
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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 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 10, 2019
The only way to do philosophy is through erotic love....p36
The book, then, cannot be read safely from a distance; readership...involves a particular labour. This position is not self-selecting, nor is the labour shaped by one's purpose: the erotic ambition of the books true reader places certain necessary tasks....p142
This is certainly not what I was taught in Phil. 100, although, being the age I was then and in the zeitgeist of the university in the late sixties, early to mid seventies, I did sense something of the sort. There was an erotic bounce to those days that is totally absent in our machine age. People might titillate themselves now with erotic imagery that entirely lacks the vital life force that is the engine of Tim Lilburn's collected essays. That he mixes and mates various perspectives is the hook that allows a baffled reader to be drawn in to his syntax following along some obscure route to some equally obscure conclusion; only to be yanked back into the immediacy of the present, trailing a maeutic apokatastasis.
a shadow book lies within the book...one gains entry into this altering, inner book through forms of attention, ways of holding language before one, which themselves provoke the same sort of change in the reader that the sequestered force within the writing later will with even greater power. Such reading is an ascesis; such reading is a lifting. One does not read for comprehension but to be made comprehensible. p80
TL digs deep beneath the level of metaphor into the subterranean layer where he tucks himself in to observe. Reading his poetry Moosewood Sandhills at the same time as these essays and just after Living in the World as If It Were Home,I may be conflating some of the highlights that he returns to, the thread that runs through all of his work, the hunt for ground of being. There is a palpable longing to step outside the mundane perspective that prevents a person from the immediacy of direct experience.
We must start again learning how to be in this place, or at least I must. We begin from scraps. We should learn the names for things as a minimum...as an act of courtesy, for musical reasons, entering the gestures of decorum. Part of such aiming will be being quiet, useless, broken maybe,if one is lucky perhaps something will come towards us....Practice an activism of forgetting the royalty of one's name, of yielding, of stepping aside. This will be like breathing through the whole body, the new, larger body of a place that might take us in. p 182
This is not part of the agenda of the prosperous go-getter celebrated by social media. I am pretty sure that when TL secluded himself in his root-cellar hermitage, he did not rely on his cell phone for distraction. How to approach a contemplative life, and then to establish a way of being that will allow one to engage in the world with integrity? If TL seems hopelessly old-fashioned at times, with his formal emphasis on ascetic practice, he has a knack for relevance.
reason has no place in the experience of contemplative seeing, though it is indispensable in the approach to it. p144
Bad writing...simply ravishes those whose permeability is without discernment; it enhances but takes one nowhere: instead it immobilizes the soul, robbing a person of eros and its motility....p40
Despite my intermittent irritation at having to look up so many words, and the struggle to assimilate them and to really comprehend TL's intentions, I believe that my ultimate ravishment by this book shows some discernment. It may be the challenge that will kick-start another way of perception, invigorating the soul with erotic possibility and "the ability to be fed by what at first confounds" p101
The book, then, cannot be read safely from a distance; readership...involves a particular labour. This position is not self-selecting, nor is the labour shaped by one's purpose: the erotic ambition of the books true reader places certain necessary tasks....p142
This is certainly not what I was taught in Phil. 100, although, being the age I was then and in the zeitgeist of the university in the late sixties, early to mid seventies, I did sense something of the sort. There was an erotic bounce to those days that is totally absent in our machine age. People might titillate themselves now with erotic imagery that entirely lacks the vital life force that is the engine of Tim Lilburn's collected essays. That he mixes and mates various perspectives is the hook that allows a baffled reader to be drawn in to his syntax following along some obscure route to some equally obscure conclusion; only to be yanked back into the immediacy of the present, trailing a maeutic apokatastasis.
a shadow book lies within the book...one gains entry into this altering, inner book through forms of attention, ways of holding language before one, which themselves provoke the same sort of change in the reader that the sequestered force within the writing later will with even greater power. Such reading is an ascesis; such reading is a lifting. One does not read for comprehension but to be made comprehensible. p80
TL digs deep beneath the level of metaphor into the subterranean layer where he tucks himself in to observe. Reading his poetry Moosewood Sandhills at the same time as these essays and just after Living in the World as If It Were Home,I may be conflating some of the highlights that he returns to, the thread that runs through all of his work, the hunt for ground of being. There is a palpable longing to step outside the mundane perspective that prevents a person from the immediacy of direct experience.
We must start again learning how to be in this place, or at least I must. We begin from scraps. We should learn the names for things as a minimum...as an act of courtesy, for musical reasons, entering the gestures of decorum. Part of such aiming will be being quiet, useless, broken maybe,if one is lucky perhaps something will come towards us....Practice an activism of forgetting the royalty of one's name, of yielding, of stepping aside. This will be like breathing through the whole body, the new, larger body of a place that might take us in. p 182
This is not part of the agenda of the prosperous go-getter celebrated by social media. I am pretty sure that when TL secluded himself in his root-cellar hermitage, he did not rely on his cell phone for distraction. How to approach a contemplative life, and then to establish a way of being that will allow one to engage in the world with integrity? If TL seems hopelessly old-fashioned at times, with his formal emphasis on ascetic practice, he has a knack for relevance.
reason has no place in the experience of contemplative seeing, though it is indispensable in the approach to it. p144
Bad writing...simply ravishes those whose permeability is without discernment; it enhances but takes one nowhere: instead it immobilizes the soul, robbing a person of eros and its motility....p40
Despite my intermittent irritation at having to look up so many words, and the struggle to assimilate them and to really comprehend TL's intentions, I believe that my ultimate ravishment by this book shows some discernment. It may be the challenge that will kick-start another way of perception, invigorating the soul with erotic possibility and "the ability to be fed by what at first confounds" p101
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February 11, 2021Not offering a rating because, in many ways, I found I wasn't the intended audience of this collection. I found it intriguing and off-putting -- poignant and elusive.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews