A Simple Thing Called Love

Albert Einstein posed the question, "How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"  Eliot Crane of Salman Rushdie's short story The Harmony of the Spheres answers the question, "Why do we lose our minds?" by stating that a simple biochemical imbalance is at fault.  What I feel Eliot is referring to is love and, in his case, the love he had for Mala.

Freud believed that "one is very crazy when in love."  Eliot suffered from brainstorms of paranoid schizophrenia and was labeled as crazy by many of those closest to him, including his wife Lucy.  He was 32 years old with no children and he believed that people around him were extraterrestials.   However it was not until the end of the story that the reader discovers the affair that Eliot was having with Mala.  Throughout Eliot's numerous memoirs and unpublished writings lied a possible explanation for his madness.  Eliot had only lustful and nasty things to say about his wife and much of the other people that he interacted with on a daily basis.  However stories of Mala differed from the rest and described steamy sexual encounters. 

Lucy mentions that Eliot was sick, and the narrator believes he knows what made him sick after reading Eliots papers.  The love that Eliot had for another woman was driving him into madness.  What was unknown at the time was that he was satisfying his madness by having an affair with his best friend's new wife.  Eliot states that he is meeting with the top men in regards to the cure to paranoid schizophrenia.  Later in the story Eliot has to leave in order to hear a lecture by a top man from Austria.  It is later found out that this trip was to hook up with Kahn's wife.

"Madness.  Love."(p. 133)

I felt that Eliot's madness came as a result of his love for Mala and following her marriage he came to the realization that she was not his to have.  This was temporarily fixed through rendez vous with her however.  While occasional flings satisfied his inner urges, I felt that the inability to have Mala as his own drove him to suicide.  As Pedro Calderon de la Barca said, "When love is not madness, it is not love."