The Humans

by Matt Haig

This book, this actual book, is set right here, on Earth. It is about the meaning of life and nothing at all.

There are other questions too that humans have in bookstores. Such as, is it one of those books they read to feel clever, or one of those they will pretend they never read in order to stay looking clever?

It reminded me that this was a place of death. Things deteriorated, degenerated, and died here. The life of a human was surrounded on all sides by darkness.

He wrote me a prescription for more diazepam and advised I take things “one day at a time,” as if there were another way for days to be experienced.

The computer was primitive. It had the words “MacBook Pro” on it, and a keypad full of letters and numbers, and a lot of arrows pointing in every possible direction. It seemed like a metaphor for human existence.

“You’re out of bed,” said Isobel. “Yes,” I said. To be a human is to state the obvious. Repeatedly, over and over, until the end of time.

(A cat, I discovered, was very much like a dog. But smaller, and without the self-esteem issues.)

It was then I realized that the one thing worse than having a dog hate you is having a dog love you. Seriously,

I laughed out loud. I had never laughed. It was a very odd feeling, but not unpleasant.

They exist simultaneously in two worlds—the world of appearances and the world of truth. The connecting strands between these worlds take many forms.

What I am saying is that it takes time to understand humans because they don’t understand themselves.

Her husband was a mystery she no longer had the energy to unravel. Anyway, it was known to be the first rule of marriage: solve the mystery, end the love.

But I am learning more about the humans. They are more complicated than we first thought. They are sometimes violent but more often care about each other. There is more goodness in them than anything else, I am convinced of it.

The only thing humans like less than winning is losing, but at least something can be done about that. With absolute winning, there is nothing to be done. They just have to deal with it.

That’s what starts to happen, when you know it is possible for you to feel pain you have no control over. You become vulnerable. Because the possibility of pain is where

love stems from. And that, for me, was very bad news indeed.

There was no such thing as impossible. I knew that, because I also knew that everything was impossible, and so the only possibilities in life were impossibilities.

Love is what the humans are all about but they don’t understand it. If they understood it, then it would disappear.

excuse for not doing something was “if only I had more time.” Perfectly valid until you realized they did have more time.

And I felt an incredible excitement at being able to witness the love reemerge inside her, because it was a total, prime-of-life love. The kind that could only be possible in someone who was going to die at some point in the future, and also someone who had lived enough to know that loving and being loved back was a hard thing to get right, but when you managed it, you could see forever.

She was a human. She knew one day her husband would die and yet she still dared to love him. That was an amazing thing.

The point of love was to help you survive. The point was also to forget meaning. To stop looking and start living.

The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.