Keeping Harmony

For most people, they are able to keep the he two halve of the brain (the creative side and the rational side) in harmony. But for others, this imbalance causes an array of fury in their lives that causes them to be unable to cope and handle life in everyday society. The difference between sanity and insanity. In the short story “The Harmony of the Spheres” in the novel East, West by Salman Rushdie, Elliot Crane can’t find a balance between his spheres which cause him to go insane and unable to live a normal life in society.

Elliot Crane was a man who had a passion for writing. As he would write, he would get very deep into his work and would over work himself than would not be able to determine what was reality or fiction. His wife Lucy describes Elliot’s condition as that the medicine he took would work then they would not work because he did not take them. He seemed better when he did not try to write but would also cause him to be worse because “not writing plunged him into such deep depressions” (Rushdie 128).  In not knowing the whole story about Elliot, but I believe that his imbalance could have been caused by his father death (suicide). This already gives him a disadvantage which mental illness runs in his family. Elliot is unable to use both side of his brain in relation to each other with caused him to go insane. He called it “a simple biochemical imbalance” (Rushdie 134). This imbalance caused him to take his own life at the age of thirty-two.

In today’s modern, high pace technological world in which we live, I feel has a greater affect on people not being able to keep themselves in harmony than before. A lot of time people are caught up with their work or other activities that they are just about that one thing and then causes them to forget about the other side, the thing that even you out. I also feel that we are too medicated these days. If somebody feels they are stressed and depressed or just can’t deal with something, they figure that there is a drug out there that will make things normal. I believe that people need to quite being hypochondriacs and deal with the curve ball life throws. Everybody is too reliant on something else instead of sucking it up and dealing with it. Everybody has their own state of sanity and insanity but some just weaker than other and can not cope with it.