Word: fragment
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...less a matter of digging than it is of discerning. It is less large projects of reconstruction than it is large efforts of imagination and even larger exercises of scholarship. It is a provocative amalgam of insight and adventure. It is the act of finding an inch-long fragment of pottery on the dull grey desert, and it is the art of seeing a whole camp site in the broken shard. It is the ability to hold that relic in the hand and hear in the mind's ear an echo of some forgotten language, almost understood...
...once the magic of Albright's system. For three years he served as his professor's pottery man, labeling, studying and endlessly discussing every potsherd from Albright's excavations. He acquired an uncanny feeling for these humble trifles. He could tell at a glance whether a fragment came from a Nabataean water bottle or a cooking pot from the days of Joshua. He still has this ability, and when he picks up a potsherd, he handles it as tenderly as a Chinese esthete caressing a piece of jade. "Pottery is man's most enduring material...
...lavish feast described by Petronius in a fragment of the Satyricon, a penetrating report of social life in the days of Nero. Trimalchio, the host, was a wealthy freedman with more farms "than a kite could flap over," and so many slaves that "not one in ten has ever seen his master...
Abel's critique of Our Lady of the Flowers, recently translated into English, is an extraordinary example of how to treat a highly sexual fragment of literature. "Genet's prose is almost always dressed up--often in drag," Abel says of the homosexual writer. "Sartre himself has called attention to the ornateness with which Genet in A Thief's Journal writes of Bulksen's behind: 'Son posterieur etait un reposoir.' ('His behind was an altar...
...later years, his youthful infatuation with the flamboyant Fauves embarrassed him as a childish excess. In 1908 Braque was drawn to fragment his vision in the manner that became known as Cubism, after seeing Picasso's panorama of naked prostitutes, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Their fractured postures impelled Braque to a further dissection of nature. He and Picasso, working together, began turning out canvases so similar that in later years they could not recall which of them had painted what. In 1912 Braque invented the paper collage, in which scraps of newsprint and ticket stubs were glued onto...