Mosaic is a form of decorative art, in which small tiles or fragments of pottery (known as tesserae, diminutive of tessellae) are used to create a pattern or picture. Analogically, life is a mosaic, and we are all tesserae.The word mosaic comes from the Old French word mosaicq "mosaic work," which in turn comes from the Medieval Latin word musaicum "mosaic work, work of the Muses," which in turn derives via the Latin word musa from the Greek word mousa, which ultimately comes from the ProtoIndo European root *mon which means "to think, remember, have one's mind aroused".
Interestingly, tesserae comes from the word tessellae which comes from via Latin from the Greek neuter of tesseres, which is a variant of tessares, which means four.
Basically, a tessellae is a four sided fragment. Interestingly, fragment comes from the Latin word fragmentum which comes from the root frangere which means "to break." Therefore, a fragment is a broken bit of something. Correlating the idea of fragment with that of mosaic, we see that a mosaic (whole) is constituted of fragments which are nothing but broken bits of something else.
Herein lies an important aspect of the mosaic analogy - the complementary notions of the part and the whole.
Implicit in this notion are a number of attributes of the part, which include:
- limited
- fractured
- unrelated
- disconnected
- piece
- disaggregated
- complete
- integrated
- related
- inter-connected
- entire
- aggregated
- the part is necessary for the whole but not sufficient
- the part is what it is in itself and is also what it is as a part of the whole
- there can be all sorts of different parts contained within a whole
- the whole cannot be grasped by looking at the part
- the part does not indicate the whole
- there is an ordering of the parts to create the whole which is distinct from the parts