lovefull

Once upon a time, Aristophanes relates, there were gods in the heavens and humans down on earth. But we humans did not look the way we look today. Instead, we each had two heads and four legs and four arms -- a perfect melding, in other words, of two people joined together, seamlessly united into one being. We came in three different gender or sexual variations: male/female meldings, male/male meldings, female/female meldings, depending on what suited each creature the best. Since we each had the perfect partner sewn into the very fabric of our being, we were all happy. Thus, all of us double-headed, eight limbed, perfectly contented creatures moved across the earth much the same way that the plants travel through the heavens -- dreamily, orderly, smoothly. We lacked for nothing; we had no unmet needs, we wanted nobody. There was no strife and no chaos. We were whole.

But in our wholeness, we became overly proud. In our pride, we neglected to worship the gods. The mighty Zeus punished us for our neglect by cutting all the double-headed, eight-limbed, perfectly contented humans in half, thereby creating a world of cruelly severed one-headed, two-legged miserable creatures. In this moment of mass amputation, Zeus inflicted on mankind the most painful of human conditions: the dull and constant sense that we are not quite whole. For the rest of time, humans would be born sensing that there was some missing part - a lost half, which we love almost more than ourselves - and that this missing part was out there someplace, spinning through the universe in the form of another person. We would also be born believing that if only we searched relentlessly enough, we might someday find that vanished half, that other soul.

-- an excerpt from Elizabeth Gilbert's new book.