MDDM Ch. 32 Twins

[Otto]

"Who should be listening to a Tale of Geminity," explains Pliny, "if not
Twins." (315.10-11)

Once upon a time, in myth, twins signified whatever dualism a culture
entertained: mortal/immortal, good/evil, creation/destruction, what had
they. In western literature since the romantic period, twins (and doubles,
shadows, mirrors) usually signify the "divided self," our secret sharer or
inner adversary--even the schizophrenia some neo-Freudians maintain lies
near the dark heart of writing. Aristophanes, in Plato's _Symposium_,
declares we are all of us twins,* indeed a kind of Siamese twins, who have
lost and who seek eternally our missing half. The loss accounts for
alienation, our felt distance from man and god; the search accounts for both
erotic love and the mystic's goal of divine atonement.
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*It may be that in fact as many as 70 percent of us are. See e.g., the
chapter "The Vanished Twin," in Kay Cassill's _Twins: Nature's Amazing
Mystery_ (New York, Atheneum, 1982).

(John Barth: "Some Reasons Why I Tell the Stories I Tell the Way I Tell Them
Rather Than Some Other Sort of Stories Some Other Way," in: _The Friday
Book. Essays and Other Nonfiction_, New York 1984, Baltimore and London
1997, p. 3).