Literature is a death cult and always has been. In reading, one kneels at the altar of the exalted dead, offering oneself to the past and passed away. Every library is by nature a boneyard; even books by the living are dead. A book is a fragment of conscience extracted (and painfully so, if done rightly) from the consciousness of its origin and severed forever at the moment of publication — of “completion,” which is really just abandonment anyway — from the vital source it sprang from. To read is to worship the dead; to write is to try and join them.
There are those who say reading is dead, that print is dead, that art itself is dead and buried. I have no interest in arguing. Let them keep scrolling. Let them think the dead don’t speak.
The truth is that the dead have no place to go but everywhere. How many lie waiting for the one who will dig? A fossil is a thing so long dead its simple persistence has outweighed the fact of its dying. It will not fade away. What is worthy will remain and will petrify and will then be called a touchstone. What is not will not be missed.
This magazine is named for a creature 250 million years gone. It’s named for a story by a man who left the world at 26 and hasn’t spent a day unread hereafter. It’s named for that which came before us and hasn’t left and will not soon. What’s good is built to last, it seems. What’s great outlasts us all.
So let us build here an ossuary. Let us sleep between these pages forever. And let us leave bones to last the next few million years, Lord willin’.
Welcome to TRILOBITE.
Happy reading,
David Lefkowitz, Editor