from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

“He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

2 thoughts on “from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

  1. the brillance that Kundera brought to this particular work, i believe, is captured in this passage as it shows how he used his novel’s structure to give “the narrator” the ability to speak in an explicit meta-consciousness voice. It allows the reader to simultaneously embrace the sentiment of the myth and question just how real is that longing is, that longing experienced in their own day-to-day lives and their memories.

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