When the gods were making man, they decided to pass along their most cherished gift — the ability to love.
Every man deserves the connection between head and heart, they’d agreed.
Without that, the head swims and the heart sinks.
Without that, man will never truly live.
They gave man a head of reason and a heart of imagination, and made sure the two existed symbiotically. This was the only way, they agreed, man would not only survive, but live a fulfilled life. He would be autonomously limitless in thought and communally unified in feeling.
As we all know, the gods’ design for man did not work.
Like the blackness of space overshadowing the pockets of brilliant life within, man’s mind grew dark in the vastness of questions. It grew discouraged and distracted. Microscopes and telescopes and stethoscopes weren’t answering the questions man demanded of himself.
Man’s heart was intended to imagine, but it too grew tired. It grew tired of the days and years of repetitive cycles with no apparent end or beginning. The gods had always existed through these cycles. Light and dark. Growth and decay. The cycle was life’s meaning. But man’s heart wasn’t able to see it this way. Nor was his mind. His mind was fixated on the linearity of it. His heart imagined only death.
The gods, fearing that man had grown ignorant, decidedly pulled away the meaning that was once made available to him throughout the pervasive signs in his surroundings. If he did not understand the shape that comprised existence, his life would be as he imagined — linear.
As punishment, they took some of man’s head — he’d had no use for the capacity that it offered. To maintain their original, interdependent design, they also also took some of man’s heart too.