The Life Impossible

by Matt Haig

There is a famous line in the most perfect of all the novels, The Sign of Four, where Holmes tells Watson that when you ‘have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’.

My capacity for guilt pre-dated Daniel. I was always prone to it, even as a child at St Cuthbert’s Catholic school wearing my St Christopher. When you had a childhood surrounded by saints it was easy to feel

like a sinner.

But there was a humility there too. You bowed your head. You said sorry when you didn’t need to. You said sorry for things you hadn’t even done. I always find it interesting when people do that. It is like an admission that everyone in the world is a little to blame for everything.

It is hard to be young and flawed, especially in a judgemental age. (Of course, every age is a judgemental age, as humans stay humans; it’s just that we move the judgements around like furniture when we want the room to feel bigger.) The one good thing about having regrets is that I no longer judge others too harshly. Every single person on this planet is a context and the circumstances of that context can never be seen fully. We are all mysteries, even to ourselves.

I thought of all the people, laughing, in holiday spirits. It all felt so fragile. In this state of mind it was hard to see any living person and not imagine the hole they would cause if they were gone. To see everyone on Earth as someone’s grief waiting to happen.

humans are essentially telepathic creatures and how our silent thoughts aren’t contained in our minds any more than light is contained in a lightbulb.

But that is how we beat death. We beat death by living while we are here. Death may be infinite, but, as we know, infinity is a relative concept. We can create a bigger infinity out of life. By feeling. And every day I feel. I feel deeply and intensely and what I feel is gratitude.

‘It looks like a miracle,’ he said, after a while. ‘Every day Ibiza has sunsets like this, and I have taken them for granted. Does that make sense?’ It made sense. ‘Galileo called mathematics the language of the book of nature. And we are trapped inside that book. We are words in that language. So it is hard to read and absorb and appreciate what we are inside, what we are familiar with. Just as Marta said, there are patterns everywhere.’