The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead’.

‘Like I still want to die. I have wanted to die for quite a while. I have carefully calculated that the pain of me living as the bloody disaster that is myself is greater than the pain anyone else will feel if I were to die.

That is just me. I add nothing. I am wallowing in self-pity. I want to die.’

‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.’

‘So, you see? Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.’

‘Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’

Maybe even suicide would have been too active. Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.

she realised it wasn’t her fault that her parents had never been able to love her the way parents were meant to: without condition.

‘You’re overthinking it.’ ‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.’

For Sylvia Plath, existence was a fig tree and each possible life she could live – the happily-married one, the successful-poet one – was this sweet juicy fig, but she couldn’t get to taste the sweet juicy figs and so they just rotted right in front of her. It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don’t live.