On the still side of the island the water held pellucid as a pane, a gloss on runes of sandstone, shale, and snail-inscribed clay silt; on the faster side it hosted a blinding profusion of curved and pitched surfaces, flecks of shadow and tatters of sky.
"How such a heterogeneous collection of the tatters, ends, and odd bits of humanity ever blended into one coherent and consistent whole I don't know, but there they are, offering problems to ethnologists and comparative philologists which will be hard to solve".
I need to get rid of the tatters but have become immolized from the weight of it all.
Among other things, it's a portrait of Hollywood in tatters and of the victims of the big studios' nineteen-sixties shipwrecks who are fighting for a place on the lifeboats (Minnelli himself being among them); as such, it's a companion-piece as well as a precursor to Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt".
Modern people, he wrote, are "vacillating, disintegrated, a blend of old and new.... My souls (characters) are conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothing, patched together as is the human soul".
The Medico-Legal Laboratheies of the province, in Montreal, made more than two thousand analyses — chemical, spectrographic, spectrophotometric, and X-ray — of various rags and tatters of clothing.
In his poem "Todesfugue" (Death Fugue), Paul Celan, a survivor of the concentration camps, gave an anguished encapsulation of the Holocaust experience, evoking the agony and death, the gas chambers and the cold relentless tread of marching feet, in remarkably few lines, draped with tatters of a kind of wistful beauty.
"We have a president that is openly supportive of white nationalist groups and working alongside his administration to dismantle the tatters of what was left of a safety net in this country and also working hard to dismantle organizations that work for the end of economic and political and emotional support of black people," Garza said.
Good of heart, keen of wit, sharp of mind, dressed in tatters and utterly bereft of cash, he brings joy to young lovers and virtue to the greedy.
And once these tyranny-defying, gun-toting patriots have saved us from ourselves, it will of course remain vital that from the tatters of our now-shredded Constitution they at least hang on to the Second Amendment -- so that when absolute power corrupts them absolutely, we can do it all again.
