The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. Sylvia Plath

But she’d been feeling lonely. And though she’d studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe,

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

A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.

sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’

The art of swimming – she supposed like any art – was about purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing.

‘If one advances confidently,’ Thoreau had written in Walden, ‘in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’ He’d also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone. ‘I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.’

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.

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

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

Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.’

sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.’

‘When you have worries about things you don’t know about, like the future, it’s a very good idea to remind yourself of things you do know.’

Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’

And she was nothing if not potential.

The sky grows dark The black over blue Yet the stars still dare To shine for you

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

We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite.

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.