Fascinating that within a section or prose about indexing within MiddleMarch (set in 1829 to 1832 and published in 1871-1872), George Eliot compares a character's distinguished appearance to that of John Locke!

Mr. Brooke asks for advice about arranging notes as he has tried pigeon holes but has the common issue of multiple storage and can't remember under which letter he's filed his particular note. Mr. Casaubon indicates that he uses pigeon-holes.

Dorothea Brooke mentions that she knows how to properly index papers so that they might be searched for and found later. She is likely aware of John Locke's indexing method from 1685 (or in English in 1706) and in the same scene compares Mr. Casaubon's appearance to Locke.

https://www.scribesofthecairogeniza.org/

Computer means can potentially be used to check or suggest potential "joins" of fragments of historical documents.

An example of some of this work can be seen in the Friedberg Genizah Project and their digital tools.

This would allow polyfilling behavior, but also leaks information that would otherwise stay between the user agent and the user.

I don't actually see why there should be any feature detectability, at least in the current spec.

Does the fact that Barthes uses a card index in his composition and organization influence the overall theme of his final works which could be described as "non-totalizable fragments"?

a good summary of the overall paper?

Wittgenstein worked with typescripts which he would often cut up into fragments so that he could reorder them for his particular needs. He had an unpublished work titled The Big Typescript of 768 pages which he created in this manner.

Link this to: - Kevin Marks' media fragments and fragmentions work - blackout poetry - mid 1900s newspaper publishing workflows

And you could go a few feet farther if you added fragment support to the site, then the browser would also autoscroll to that part. Then you could add a confetti cannon to the system and have the page rain down confetti when more than three people have highlighted the same section!

Many in the IndieWeb have already prototyped this using some open web standards. It's embodied in the idea of media fragments and fragmentions, a portmanteau of the words fragment and Webmention.

A great example can be found at https://www.kartikprabhu.com/articles/marginalia

This reminds me that I need to kick my own server to fix the functionality on my main site and potentially add it to a few others.

I'm reminded of a JavaScript tool written by Aaron Parecki that automatically adds a start fragment to the URL of his page when the audio on the page is paused. He's documented it here: https://indieweb.org/media_fragment

enjambment and fragmental parts

I think of how there is an even balance of negative and positive in life. Good and evil, life and death. Its that comparison and equalization. with gain comes loss.

When i hear this i think of death but also wiped out memories. I remembered seeing in a movie that after the snow this boys memory of a girl was wiped clean. The snow melts after a while which results in it being forgetful because it docent stay for that long. Almost like a memory being lost or a lost of life.

I think this line refers to the poem itself. The poem is full of images as it moves, and often they feel disparate and negative, like "dead land" next to "breeding lilacs" in the opening two lines. The poem is a pile of fragments brought together. The fragments interact within the pile or the poem to create meaning.

These lines again convey the fragmented, ruined aspect of them poem. Eliot uses a fragmented, incoherent form—as well as portraying a fragmented reality—in order to symbolize the crumbling of society. The line, “these fragments I have shored against my ruins” is used at the very end of the poem as a sort of verbal sigh—as if to say, “I will carry on through the rubble and ruins”. Within the poem, Eliot speaks of redemption and rising above the desolation and destruction society will experience, but in the end he tells us that life is inherently fragmented, and suggests that we must accept this.

The line, “Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe,” is in reference to “The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronymo is Mad Again,” an Elizabethan tragedy by Thomas Kyd (written between 1582 and 1592). In this play, Hieronymo is driven near madness after the murder of his son, and he decides to take revenge by killing the murderers. This is made possible when the murderers ask him to supply a play for the court, and he takes this as an opportunity to kill them. He says, “why then ile fit you,” which means that he will accommodate their wishes. Though, he also means to kill his son’s murderers.

The reference to this play may suggest that the speaker in The Waste Land sees himself in the role of Hieronymo, driven to madness over the loss of a senseless death. In Eliot’s case, perhaps it is the loss of humanity that drives him near madness. And perhaps these losses themselves are solitary fragmented moments in the characters’ lives—awful things happen, and we cannot make sense of them, which has a profoundly uncomfortable affect on us. Like Eliot’s use of multiple fragmented languages in The Waste Land (often leaving the reader questioning why he chooses to do so), Hieronymo conducts his play in various languages, leaving the actors puzzled. Eliot may believe that fragments are essential for understanding the essence of the whole—we cannot necessarily connect the fragments of life together in a coherent pattern, but we can experience them all in a random sequence. Even the three lines in this annotation don’t clearly connect to one another—they are fragments, references to various notions and various pieces of literature.

“Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.” means, “give, sympathize, control.” This line in “What The Thunder Said,” is taken from a Hindu fable in the Brihadaranyaka Upianshad, called The Fable of the Meaning of Thunder/The Voice of Thunder. According to the story, thunder makes “Da” sounds, and these three words in Sanskrit are supposed to represent this sound of thunder. One theory proposes that Eliot suggests that the thunder will give us the rainwater we need to help replenish our dead wasteland of a world. “Give, Sympathize, Control,” may be Eliot’s final messages/commands/lessons to his readers. He has shown us through many fragments the ailments of man and suggests a change needs to be made.

Perhaps, Eliot ends this dismal poem with a chance of hope, telling us that no matter how much death and destruction the world faces there is always a chance at redemption. Or, perhaps these fragmented last lines—that possibly have no connection to each other—cannot be taken as a true “ending” to the poem. If we think of the entire poem as many fragments, can there be an "ending" an all? Perhaps it is just another fragment, another instance of intertextuality. Hieronymo definitely takes control, but does he show sympathy? Are we left with his “madness,” a feeling of despair, and the meaninglessness of life, yet a possible redemption? Do we even need to make a connection between these last three lines, or is that the point of the fragmentation—we cannot connect everything, but we can gather many separate meanings. We may simply take away a general tone or just an overall reading experience. These three lines don’t seem connected to each other, but they do share a similar fragmented “vibe,” it seems.

Eliot’s many instances of intertextuality, fragments, stories that don’t connect, relate to the overall idea of a land laid to waste, an apocalyptic, destroyed world where only bits and pieces remain. The fragments might also relate to a sort of dialogism—though the instances of intertextuality aren’t directly connected, Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism says, in a very basic form, that every text is affected by the texts that came before it, and also every text in the future affects all texts from the past. Perhaps this jumbled, fragmented mess of a poem, in part, plays with the idea that although things do not seem connected everything matters. We can never read the same text the same way twice, and our reading of The Waste Land will affect how we view the texts that it references. So despite the disconnected fragments, there is a way that the various fragmented pieces affect one another.

With the line “I never know what you are thinking,” the speaker wants to find connections to their friend/lover/acquaintance. They feel uneasy with whomever they are talking to, since the speaker cannot see the inner workings of their mind. They are realizing that life is fragmented. Additionally, the speech in these lines is fragmented, with the speaker moving from one subject to the next—they are nervous, they want human connection, and they want to know what the other is thinking. For the speaker, physical closeness isn’t enough of a connection—they are uncomfortable with silence. This silence seems to add to their nerves, and perhaps they think that the other person speaking, sharing their thoughts, will quiet their own mind, distract them from their own fragmented thoughts. The speaker feels isolated. There is a sense of urgency and fear, a need to make connections, to solve the puzzle—of life, and of what their friend is thinking.

Within the poem overall, we get a sense of this fragmentation—the stanzas don’t all necessarily connect. Aside from trying to find any meaning within the poem, as readers we experience this sense of fragmentation. Trying to connect the lines, even within separate sections, is near impossible and can make the reader uneasy. Like the speaker in these lines, we wonder, “what is Eliot thinking here?” Similarly, in Gertrude Stein’s “Sacred Emily,” the reader encounters a fragmented reading experience, where the experience of reading seems more important than any overall connected meaning. The flecks, the broken images presented convey different feelings, and present us with various images. We are uneasy, as readers, that everything doesn’t connect, like the speaker in these lines from Eliot.

In William Carlos Williams's “To Elsie,” he says that, “it is only in isolate flecks that something is given off.” Like Eliot, Williams believes that meaning can only be found in fragments—we can understand bits and pieces, but cannot always make connections among the flecks. If everything in life only occurs in unconnected, isolated fragments, we feel very little control—like the speaker in these lines.

With all of the apocalyptic imagery through the poem, the broken society, decaying nature, and impossibility of rationally, logically connecting everything to some greater meaning, it is clear why the speaker’s nerves are bad. They don’t want to feel alone, fragmented—they want to find connections to people, as well as connections within their lives. What this says, perhaps, is that fragmentation, relates to some sort of epistemological/existential crises. Not knowing how to make sense of the bits and pieces leaves one feeling uneasy. For the speaker, silence is not golden—silence here implies that one is busy thinking something secretive and mysterious, and these thoughts are presented as an uncomfortable unknown. The fact that we are never able to know what another person is truly thinking is an unsettling thought. With speech, we at least find comfort in some semblance of connection, but can we ever truly communicate perfectly? Will we ever truly know what another person is thinking? Or can we simply try to grasp small truths, small fragments of meaning in our lives?

This is a clip from the movie The Rules of Attraction. I think that this scene applies to the concept of fragmentation, and these lines in particular, because it shows the inability of knowing what other people are thinking. The characters in this story all barely ever talk to each other but they formulate the idea that they are in relationships with each other. They grasp onto little fragments, small interactions, and they misinterpret them, trying to find connections when there is none. They are afraid of being alone, of a world where small moments are insignificant and cannot be connected to something greater. They claim to want to know what the other person is thinking, but all are confronted with the fact that, as Lauren says, “What does that mean, know me? Know me. Nobody knows anyone else, ever. You will never, ever know me.” Here, like in The Waste Land, fragmentation creates an existential alienation.

![seeking meaning] (https://amnesianaut.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/charlie-brown-3eanuts-paul-tunis.png?w=590)

Eliot's reference to fragments and ruins: the first group revealed is the "He." They are a group of people who are already dead, functioning as a forshadowment of the future. The "He" community is the community of "ruins." They serve as statues representing the remnants of life. In a way they are fragments as well because they are part of a past, a piece of history, therefore they are fragments of the life cycle. Those that are living but not quite dead, the "We," will soon join the community of the "ruins" and of the dead because they are also in the process of dying. By dying they are parting themselves into fragments that no longer work and therefore can no longer live. In order for life to be sustained the body must function as whole, all organs must be working together one. But as they decay they become fragments that can no longer sustain life. By this, they are not living but merely waiting to die and become ruins themselves. This process of ones life decaying reveals the entropy of the "We" who are losing fragments of their living selves as they are dying. This reveals that life itself is ironic in nature because no matter how one lives he will always die. Similarly, Robert Frost reveals that decisions made by the living cannot manipulate the end result of death. Therefore life itself is single a road that leads to ones own fragmentation and fate of becoming a "ruin" without diversion.

In the poem, “The Wasteland,” T.S. Eliot wastes no time in creating imagery of the fragmented / ruins. Just the very form it is written in fragments the poem as a whole. Eliot mixes the motif of the fragmented with the ruined, and the first instance of the ruin in the piece comes from section I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD. Burials and death are both forms of physical destruction or disintegration, and Eliot sets the tone for the beginning of the poem with this theme.

Death is fragmented in the sense of its decomposition. In the second line: “Lilacs out of the dead land,” Eliot continues the theme of ruins by juxtaposing life and Nature with death. The land is dead, fragmented, and ruined.

“Memory and desire,” he says in the third line. Memories are a fragmentation of the past, and desire can often end in ruins.

Eliot continues the motif of the fragmented in that stanza, but he switches from nature and life and death to a fragment in the language with the shift from English to German: “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.” This translates to "I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German." The line suggests the woman can identify herself racially, and socially, but not spiritually, and there lies more fragmentation within the individual. There is also a doubleness or double consciousness that was presented in the reading by Du Bois. Although composed or influenced by different cultures, the fragment comes with not having just one identity.

Knowledge, like memory, is fragmented and like the branches and roots that grow off of the tree, is understood in bits and pieces. Eliot says that the “Son of man” could never get to experience the whole of life. Like the roots and branches, man only gets to be a part of the whole. Man would only get to experience the essence of life through a “heap of broken images.” The broken images that make up the city man lives in could be the reflection of a hard society he is a part of. Eliot also says that the city is made out of “stony rubbish” which makes it feel very cold, isolated, and somehow expendable.

Eliot is highlighting the lack of nature in the city except for a tree that offers no shelter or life. Light perhaps tries to fight itself into the city “where the sun beats” to offer life, warmth, and hope but it seems to be in vain. Like Henry Adams' "The Dynamo and the Virgin," Eliot suggests that the people are no longer a simple being; they are a part of something bigger, something that keeps building rubbish upon rubbish. The people have become more about facts and sequence and it has damaged them. They are not experiencing life like Gaudens experiences the cathedral and the result of that is a broken society. The lack of consciousness makes the people neither living nor dead for even song, “the cricket” offers “no relief,” cannot shake them out of their miserable state. We can see how Eliot perceived this new generation through the broken images of wasted nature, wasted society, and a wasted city that has itself become a wasteland, as there is “no sound of water “in” the dry stone.

There are many different instances of the "fragment" or "ruins" motif in this poem that appear through different mediums. Sometimes Eliot uses the formatting of the poem to create fragments, which can be seen in "II. A GAME OF CHESS" by the fragmented language. Other times, as he does in this stanza, he personifies fragmentation. This paragraph signifies the motif of fragmentation by fragmenting a character in the story into two separate people. One way of viewing these lines is that the person the narrator is describing is leading a double life or double consciousness, and the narrator is now seeing this person's doubleness. Another interpretation- that seems to be the most popular- is that the narrator is hallucinating that there is another person walking with them.

This interpretation comes from the story of Ernest Shackleton, a polar explorer that lead expeditions to Antarctica, who cited in one of his books that he once hallucinated while on an expedition. This explanation covers why the narrator is looking "ahead up the white road". "The Wasteland" was written shortly after WWI ended, leaving some of the world in ruins and fragmented apart from each other. Eliot could be citing Shackleton's hallucination experience because the world (especially the US) was experiencing its own post-war hallucinations of grandeur during the party age of the 1920s. Much of the 1920s was about forgetting the troubles of the world and pretending like life was fine and dandy. The people of this time not only created their own hallucinations of a better life, but created a double consciousness for themselves by buying into these hallucinations. Fragmentation can also be a form of compartmentalization, which is exactly what the time period that the poem was written in, was about.

showing the dirty hands of a laborer

These things are what make summer nights

Describing her room in fragments to get essecence of the whole

son of man cannot know the whole. gets knowledge in heaps of broken images.

The beginning of "The Fire Sermon" offers imagery of an abandoned society, devoid of any vestiges of human life. The nymphs are departed, have left no addresses, which suggests that they have fled the barren land. Mythologically, nymphs are associated with pleasure, song, nature, and youth; clearly, this Unreal City has nothing to offer in terms of hedonism, so the nymphs have no choice but to depart without a trace, perhaps to return back to nature.

could this be an example of fragments? maybe the person Eliot is describing has become two different people, fragmented version of their former self

an obvious example of fragment/ ruins motif

"Tell the whole world, and keep nothing back. Raise a signal flag to tell everyone that Babylon will fall! Her images and idols will be shattered" - Jeremiah 50:2

The dead men that are undead "Zombies" The lost bones are possibly scattered away from the dead men hence "fragments"