Why fragments?

I refer to the entries on this site – whether they be entries in my journal or my notes – as fragments.

What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.

— Susan Sontag in Eileen Manion and Sherry Simon's, An Interview with Susan Sontag, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, Vol. 9, p. 12, 1985

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Lyceum Fragments, 1797

A fragment is not a fragment on account of it’s brevity, though most are short, it is a fragment because it is separated from the rest of its complete self by the ignorance of the author, by the narrowness of my comprehension! Thinking of my writing as mere fragments is an acknowledgement of the limits of my own thinking and my desire to gradually overcome them. Beecher at least makes me feel a little better about my inadequacy here:

Nobody ever sees truth except in fragments.

— Henry Ward Beecher, The Original Plymouth Pulpit, 1871

Besides, breadth and completeness aren’t always necessary, and sometimes they’re just not possible. I mimic Sontag and confirm Schlegel in feeling that the written fragment is a distinctly modern archetype, one that I choose to embrace as a vessel for setting free those ideas that might otherwise languish in that status.