Geologists are puzzle freaks who love nothing more than collecting fragmentary clues -- clumps of gravel, fossilized shells and pollens, the dates that muddy sediments were deposited in dried-up lakes or whole mountain ranges were lifted -- and then trying desperately to figure out how the modern topography before their eyes was produced.
Famous last words, since Beckett did continue writing fiction, notably "the grisly afterbirth" of the trilogy collected in the fragmentary "Texts for Nothing," and then, in the eighties, a beautiful sequence of short prose works: "Company," "Ill Seen Ill Said," and "Worstward Ho".
He would remember nothing of his breakdown except for fragmentary recollections of the "very terrible hospital" where, he once said, a patient was killed by the guards.
Yet "Tsu-Ku-Tsu" was so fragmentary that it eventually became nothing more than a collection of fancy balancing acts.
They were utterly lovely – but they were also utterly alone: with a very few fragmentary exceptions, there is almost nothing else surviving from the ancient Indian past to compare them to.
The biology of White-faced Quail-Dove is poorly known, much like those of many of its congeners, with almost nothing known about its diet and only fragmentary data available concerning breeding.
Still, cultists love fragmentary, scattered bodies of work, they enjoy nothing more than chasing down obscure remixes and impossible-to-find mixtapes.
Despite the film's many flaws - a sluggish pace and fragmentary, episodic approach frustrated more often than it enlightened - nothing could detract from Sheen's evocation of Williams's unique brand of British campery.
But there was another reason, literary in origin, which led me to this name: a brief interlude by TS Eliot entitled "What About Pereira?" in which a fragmentary conversation between two friends evokes a mysterious Portuguese man named Pereira, about whom nothing can ever be known.
Therese Anne Fowler's best-selling novel "Z.," written in Zelda's persona — though in nothing like her original, run-on rhapsodic literary voice, evident in her letters and one promising, if fragmentary, novel — is a recent installment in the story.
