in gualba, she of the thousand voices by eugenio d'ors, "the forty-five-year-old man thinks about plato's immortal dialogue." "plato knows about love," thinks the man, "about the search and the tragedy of the seach. the myth of the original, unique being - androgynous, later divided into two halves that seek each other in order to be complete together - is full of light. but because plato was an optimist, he describes the imaginary success of this search, not the ultimate failure. he writes beautifully about the first half of the erotic process but forgets the second half, in which everything goes wrong. plato is a philosopher and a poet; he is not a lover."
from cees nooteboom's in the dutch mountains, a much loved book
we look at two novels in which...the main character briefly reflects on plato's symposium. tomas, in kundera's the unbearable lightness of being, thinks of the famous myth from the 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...somewhere in the world each of us has a partner who once formed part of our body." to tomas, this is not the woman he is now living with and whom he loves, tereza. it is someone else, a girl he has dreamed of. what would happen if he found her? would he then leave tereza? no, he would not. if he ever were to find the dreamed other half, he would flee from her and stay with the woman who is not the dreamed lost half but for whom he nevertheless feels a love that "he cannot express."