On Our Way to Madness

    Distractions, obligations, and convictions are things that contribute to our mental mood.  We each perceive the world differently and act on our views.  For some, there are chemical imbalances that have the biggest, and most detrimental influence on their minds. There are also contradicting influences that cause great disturbance to our personal harmony, like feeling too over weight at 90 lbs. and wanting only to run.  Salman Rushdie, author of the short story, “The Harmony of the Spheres,” explores these things that we put importance on and what role they play in the harmony of our lives. 
   

    This is a short story about a man who struggles with paranoid schizophrenia, eventually taking his own life.  Eliot Crane, the protagonist, was a writer who had always struggled with personal demons that came to him in the form of hallucinations.  Every time he was researching for his book or scientific discovery on keeping harmony of the spheres through cult followings, his imbalance would overcome him and he would only be able to produce rants and raves.  It seems Rushdie is trying to point out he desires an explanation and quick fix, but can never mentally grasp the concept. What one thinks one is doing to help the situation is only hurting.  I think what Rushdie wants to prove is that we are fooling ourselves into a false sense of security which will only lead us to give up on our happiness.
   

    Rushdie also uses the narrator, Khan, who is a friend to Crane, to show that people without chemical imbalances can cause themselves disharmony by not reflecting on themselves.  By not looking with objective detail into our own psyche, we can become disillusioned with a false sense of balance.  Khan spends his time watching his friend Eliot slowly spiral into a state of total abandonment for hope.  He does not concern himself with his actions of infidelity of lead to, his wife committing the same adulterous acts that he himself did.  Khan seems to hold himself in high regard in relation to Crane, since he is free of mental illness, and therefore is in greater control of his surroundings.  However, it was Khan’s arrogance that blinded him from noticing the imbalance in his own marriage.  At the end of the story, Khan’s ex-wife enlightens him on his lack of concern for himself by telling him that while he was away coveting another man’s wife, she conspired with a man he gave no credit too.
   

    Eliot Crane’s battle for mental stability was facing uphill from the beginning, but he still remained hopeful.  Khan, however, was distracted by this, which undoubtedly caused a disruption of the spheres that he had created in his own life.  He either did not care that his ex-wife was not loyal to him, or that he, as a person living in reality, would not have that reality ripped out from under his feet.  I think Rushdie is trying to show how we look to often at other people’s lives and the disharmony there, thus taking away from the time that could have been spent on personal reflection.  Without time to inspect and adjust our own situation, we set ourselves up to have brutal reminders.