"Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness.
The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker
down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their
goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking
what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged,
kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of
leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that
great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a
piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps
something might be done about putting the thing back together again.
Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves.
First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed
lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no
matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the
way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the
job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged
bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to
build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious
original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build
out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial
and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts
us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure,
in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps,
accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call
these scale models “works of art.”"
From the painfully beautiful article Wes Anderson's Worlds by Michael Chabon
(via The New York Review of Books Blog)