walking the line

It’s that time again, FINALS!!! A time when people begin to stress out about the smallest of things in theirs lives. A time when procrastination is at it’s best. People would rather do things they would never think of doing instead of studying for finals. A time when leaving a sink full of your dirty dishes can send your roommate over the edge. I you can say it’s a time when we as college students tend to lose our sense of balance in life and our harmony.

In the short story “The Harmony of Spheres” written by Salman Rushdie in his novel of satires, “East, West” the main character Eliot is a man stuck in a body that is taunted by supernatural powers and from his past.  His grey area of the real world and the supernatural has sent his schizophrenia over the edge.  He is in search of meaning, a revelation. His answer was death.

Eliot was a curious man, he questioned everything. He questioned life itself and to the existence of magic.  He became so immersed in magic that in the end it was hard for him to tell magic to reality. As a writer Eliot wrote of the dark arts. It was a mystery to him that enjoyed learning what little he could about it.

Eliot becomes so immersed in the dark arts and his schizophrenia gets so bad that he begins to push away the most important people in his life. He thinks his best friend Khan is a martian.  Khan feels that Elliots “immersion in the dark arts was more than merely scholarly”. He believed his talent as a writer hid his obsession. He also believed that Elliot’s obsession was making his schizophrenia worse. He begins to lose his balance of harmony. He no longer can live a life on this tight rope of functioning in society with schizophrenia and being obsessed with the dark arts.  Eliot feels that he has lost his sense of balance because he has a chemical imbalance. As a psychology major I feel that this could have some validity. I also feel that there could be other factors that could have caused him to lose touch with reality. I think that along with his schizophrenia I think he was depressed. He had so many questions about life and the meaning and his purpose that he never found answers for. He felt hopeless. He was losing touch with his wife and with his best friend. I think he believed that if he killed himself all of his questions would be answered.

We all have those moments where we lose our sense of harmony. I don’t believe that the question is why we lose our harmony but rather how we go back to being in balance and having harmony. I think this is where so many people go wrong. They get stuck in a funk and they lose hope. They feel that there is no one else who feels the same way and they are alone. We just need to find that thing that brings the harmony back into our lives. I’ll be doing this in the next week as I prepare to study my but off.