“Long before we’ve had
chance to become truly familiar with our loved one, we may be filled with the
curious sense that we know them already. It can seem as though we’ve met them
somewhere before, in a previous life perhaps, or in our dream. In Plato’s
Symposium, Aristophanes accounts for this feeling of familiarity by claiming
that the loved one was our long-lost “other half” to whose body our own had
originally been joined. In the beginning, all human beings were hermaphrodites
with double back and flanks, four hands and four legs, and two faces turned in
opposite directions on the same head. These hermaphrodites were so powerful and
their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two, into a male
and female half – and from that day, every man and woman has yearned
nostalgically but confusedly to rejoin the part from which he or she was
severed.”
Alain de Botton “On Love”
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