It Is A Mad Mad World

            My uncle has the philosophy that there is always a perfectly balanced amount of body fat in the world. He feels that if one person is losing weight, that someone, somewhere in the world is gaining that fat. He believes there is a perfect harmony in the world; that everything coincides perfectly. My family is also slightly superstitious, with my mom having followed the Maharishi around in the 60’s and 70’s. People often get carried away in their own little worlds, especially when they get very into things such as the “dark arts” like palm reading, devil worship and other reading and dark things.

            The narrator of the story constantly refers to people as “aliens” and “martians”, possibly to show how everyone is distant from each other in their own ways. I also this is to show that people are each slightly alienated from society; enough so to feel it is necessary to kill themselves to escape from reality. The gun used for the suicide on the first page was the mans father’s. This was used for the same purpose, “the weapon had belonged to his father, who had put it to the same use.” (Rushdie, 125) This is the first sign of madness, at least from my point of view. If a family member of mine used a weapon to kill themselves, I would not want to keep it; it would constantly remind me of that horrible day. Everyone in the story is slightly mad, including Eliot’s wife. When she got an epiphany that something bad happened and saw that her husband was dead she, “went back to bed and slept soundly until morning.” (Rushdie, 125)

            The narrator then gets into psychic readings and whatnot. “From Eliot I leaned the secrets of the Great Pyramid, the mysteries of the Golden Section and the intricacies of the Spiral.” (Rushdie, 137) The fact that the narrator believed Eliot and the fact that Eliot believed himself into thinking that he knew all those secrets shows that he was beginning to go mad. Eliot constantly wrote during his schizophrenic stages. When Mr. Khan decides to go through all his work to spare Eliot’s widow, Lucy emotional problems he discovers how sick and demented he really is. “The pages about Lucy were both nasty and lubricious.” “‘He was sick.’” (Rushdie, 144)

            I feel that there is a delicate balance of harmony in the universe. There are crazy people in the world just like there are perfectly level headed rational people. Even old sane people can end up with a degenerative disease such as vCJD (mad cow) or Alzheimer’s. This keeps the world balanced and workable for everyone.