Twenty-Two Instructions for Near Survival

By Roger Lebovitz

Twenty-Two Instructions for Near Survival: You start reading a book, but suddenly the words crowd against each other and a riot ensues. Later a group of men with shovels sails down a river on their way to dig the great pit. But the pit will never be built. In another time and place a drunk wakes up one morning with a hangover and a surprising translation of an ancient prayer.

Twenty-Two Instructions for Near Survival: The instructions are everywhere and nowhere. You might observe them, for example, at the top of the hill where Sisyphus has spent years hauling his rocks. Or late at night when an old man looks to recover his past by touching the rails of long forgotten train lines. Or at the end of a long day where a little boy blows a horn so that his hometown does not fall down. Or as a courier strives to deliver his message before it is too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fomite
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781944388973

Book preview

Twenty-Two Instructions for Near Survival

Twenty-Two Instructions for Near Survival

Roger Lebovitz

Fomite

For Henry

"While the fireweed blooms, while the fireweed blooms

I need no other books, except you

I need no other

I need no other"

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­— Boris Grebenshikov

Contents

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Chapter 1

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Chapter 2

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Chapter 3

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Chapter 4

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Chapter 5

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Chapter 6

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Chapter 7

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Chapter 8

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Chapter 9

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Chapter 10

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Chapter 11

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Chapter 12

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Chapter 13

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Chapter 14

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Chapter 15

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Chapter 16

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Chapter 17

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Chapter 18

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Chapter 19

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Chapter 20

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Chapter 21

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Chapter 22

About the Author

Does the belief persist that all books

have already been written?

1

Start reading a book. Before your eyes stands a crowd of words, letters elbowing one another aside, knocking the breath out of each other, pushing and shoving, shouting and grunting, gesturing obscenely at one another and spilling a confused din into every sentence and across every line. Each page battles the other, the punctuation has torn itself apart and footnotes clutch and cling for their lives at the bottom of the pages. The pagination has rioted, there is disorder in the index, and the table of contents is insane .

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You re-read and re-read to see what you’ve missed, to see whether your eyes heaving together with the tattered nets of your mind might somehow haul up some meaning from this chaotic sea, but each time through is different from the time before, and you check to make sure that the book hasn’t changed. It hasn’t. The cover is the same cover and the title is the same title and the author is the same author. But then you check again and none of these are the same.

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And there are more pages to go. The book is thousands of pages long. And all the letters at the start of the book have a part in the words to come. You will never get to the end of the book, and if you did this book is just one book on a shelf with dozens of other books, and the shelf is just one shelf in a room with dozens of shelves, and the room is just one room in a library with dozens of rooms and the library is just one library