The Harmony of the Spheres

How do we really know that you or I are not really mad? How do we really know what we see and experience is really real? The answer is we don’t, we simply rely on the responses of others to judge whether or not our sense of reality is that which we believe it to be. This has never been portrayed more clearly then within the story of “The Harmony of the Spheres” written by Salman Rushdie.

The story, tells of two friends, Eliot Crane and the nameless narrator. The two men’s lives are encircled through Eliot’s passions for the occult and both men’s apparent long time friendship. Eliot was an eccentric writer suffering from schizophrenia and the narrator was his seemingly caring friend. Both men were very unlike one another. The narrator was an anti-war protestor, a vegetarian, and an all around liberal; while Elliot was an animal killing, meat eating, all around conservative. There friendship was strange, yet both men had always had a strange connection.

Unfortunately, there had been a falling out between the men, a few years back, when Elliot began believing the narrator was a Martian. He thought he and Martiankind were imitating humankind and slowly integrating themselves into our society to take it over. It was a very strange accusation, but never-the-less illustrated the level of Elliot’s mental dysfunction. He had truly gone over the edge and it was apparent to everyone.

Some time later, the narrator had heard Elliot had had another schizophrenic episode, when he decides to dive down the wrong side of the road, blindfolded, and going 90 mph. It had seemed these episodes were becoming more and more crazed. Therefore, when the day came that Elliot blew his own head off with his shotgun, few were surprised.

It had seemed Elliot’s mind had become completely warped. It was not until the narrator went through Elliot’s personal papers that he found perhaps Elliot was not as crazy as he once believed, simply just feeling guilty. Elliot had written two different types of papers again and again; one was hate filled and the other pornographic. The hate filled letters were towards his wife Lucy and the narrator. The pornographic letters were about him and the narrator’s wife having steamy sex and were dated to maximize their auto-erotic effect.

The narrator chalked it all up as the ramblings of a sick man. These letters probably meant nothing, he had thought. It wasn’t until he shared them with his wife that he discovered the truth. She in three worlds collapsed his entire world “Those weren’t fantasies”. Suddenly, all seemed lost to the narrator. Had Elliot truly been crazy? Was it all an elaborate sureade? Or was he himself mad for not seeing this in the first place?

It was truly an Ironic ending to a seemingly strange friendship and a great short story. The narrator’s world was burst in an instant. He was thrown back from all he thought he knew. All he could do was sit there and, in the worst way possible, come to realize that the spheres of harmony that he once called life were destroyed. Elliot had deceived him and the relationship he had had with his wife was a lie. There was no harmony left in the world. All he could do was live with a broken heart and a sense of disbelief.