I’ve been thinking about fragments and “edges” and “debris” lately. The consensus in the media I’ve consumed in that regard seems to be that wholeness necessarily includes imperfection; i.e. human wholeness precludes perfection, and perfection’s presumption is nothing more than a falsely conceived collection of incomplete parts. The true face of human wholeness is that there isn’t any; authenticity demands that our brokenness be recognized. So, honestly, human imperfect wholeness points to a God who takes the fragments and accepts the edges (without taking them off) and transforms them into a wholeness that is certainly not debris, for it doesn’t pick and choose, rather it takes everything up and puts it in its right place. The result is an unspeakable vibrancy that never loses its luster, for its glowing is from within and not from some mortal veneer.

If it’s rough, if it has a rough quality it transcends. If you repeat music too often, if you rub the edges off music you really take away the music itself. The music is in the edges, it’s in the rough bits. If you smooth it over there’s really nothing left. You’ve got lots of notes left, but there’s no music. So it’s always a striving [sic] to keep it something alive, something fresh, something that has vitality to it.
In the Edges: The Grizzly Man Session, Richard Thompson

If you attempt to edit Shelley, or Wordsworth or Goethe in this way, there is no point at which you must stop rather than another, and what you get in the end by this process is something which is not Shelley, or Wordsworth or Goethe at all, but a mere unrelated heap of charming stanzas, the debris of poetry rather than poetry itself. And by using, or abusing, this principle of isolation you are in danger of seeking from poetry some illusory pure enjoyment, of separating poetry from everything else in the world, and cheating yourself out of a great deal that poetry has to give to your development.
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, by T.S. Eliot (98)