How do you restore the Harmony?

As my college years come to a close I am overwhelmed with decisions that will affect the rest of my life. What once felt like a balanced word is becoming unsteady and extremely stressful. Many people experience times like these, some regain their balance and others fall. Fortunately I have coping mechanisms and techniques that I can use to help restore harmony to my life which enables me to work through these tough times.

My personal struggle is a minuscule compared to Eliot Cranes struggle in Salman Rushdie’s The Harmony of the Spheres. As we grow up we come to understand reality as what is currently occurring, what is real, and what we know. A major focus in Rushdie’s story is Crane’s struggle between what is real and what he creates in his head. The narrator of the story is Crane’s best friend Mr. Khan, who, throughout the story attempts to find reasons as to why his friend has entered into madness. This question is proposed in the book on page 134: “Why do we lose our minds?” and then we are told that Eliot’s view was, “A simple biochemical imbalance”. This simplistic description does not seem to pay Crane’s imbalance justice. He believed that most of his friends were, “both Earthly and extra-terrestrial” (127) and that he was often visited by, “demons” (126, 135). Crane’s struggle between what is real and what is not often conflicts with his brilliance and may be the source for his lose of balance and harmony.

Crane said that, “various biochemical’s surged, off-balance, through my veins as well” (134). Here Rushdie is suggesting a physical cause to his psychological imbalance but is that the only reason? This story suggests that people often lose their balance and harmony through typical life events. However Crane was anything but typical, “He was the author of a scholarly two-volume study of overt and convert occultist groups in nineteenth-and twentiety-century Europe” that is ironically entitled, “The Harmony of the Spheres” (130). So perhaps his brilliance causes his madness.

This was seen in the movie A Beautiful Mind where we are shown that reality can sometimes be deceitful and what we consider real can often times be a delusion. Throughout the movie we are introduced to the character John Nash and we learn that there are circumstances and events that have not actually taken place; they are made-up figments of his imagination. Eventually we come to learn that he has schizophrenia and certain events and people in his life are not real. Eliot Crane also suffers from, “paranoid schizophrenia” or what he liked to call, “brainstorms” (125). Perhaps it was these “brainstorms” that made both Nash and Crane lose their balance and harmony to life. Despite their brilliance they may not have been able to develop the coping mechanisms that I am able to use during stressful times throughout my life. Brilliance may hinder their ability to balance their life, but this story suggests that everyone must limit what they deal with in order to maintain their own personal harmony.