The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

‘Cats are too disobedient,’ he said, sounding like the brother she remembered. ‘Dogs know their place.’ ‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.’

‘Life is full of strange phenomena.’

The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.

The life of a human, according to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, was of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.

‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’ he said, wisely.

I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.

You seem to realise that life could be worth living, if only you found the right one to exist inside.

All good things are wild and free.

Maybe there was no perfect life for her, but somewhere, surely, there was a life worth living. And if she was to find a life truly worth living, she realised she would have to cast a wider net.

‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the one less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference . . .’

‘Compassion is the basis of morality,’ the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had written, in one of his softer moments. Maybe it was the basis of life too.

Never trust someone who is willingly rude to low-paid service staff

‘Well, yes. But now you are lost within your lostness.

‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’

‘Kindness is a strong force.’

‘on a spiritual quest for a deeper connection with the universe’

Never underestimate the big importance of small things,

And she didn’t want to live any other life than the one that was hers. The one that could be a messy struggle, but it was her messy struggle. A beautiful messy struggle.

‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’

It was life.

let’s be kind to the people in our own existence.

I have found something within this darkness. Hope. Potential.

I hit rock bottom and found something solid there.

The impossible, I suppose, happens via living.

Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No. But do I want to live? Yes. Yes.

‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’

She wouldn’t poison herself with the pressures of imagined perfection.

She would accept the darkness of life in a way she never had,

An overture of unknowability.)

Even when situations and chemistries didn’t change, perspectives could.

The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil – rich, fertile soil. She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself.