Tim Lilburn

These three things, religion, philosophy, poetry, seem roughly the same to me; they reach for the same things. At the center of each is a loneliness, a sizable ache for return, for the enjoyment of a larger self where you can roam. And each requires, or calls out, a way of life, a practice or singleness of attention that spreads through a person. All three, by nature, are katabatic; they dream of going deep. I’m not talking about religion and philosophy as solely a series of positions—this sort of thing strikes me as betrayal of what both are—but as the enactment of stretching longing. And prayer, conversation and metaphor with its music, the rooms in which the three respectively live, all give me a similar sort of pleasure.