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

I want a print ofthis quote on my wall

‘I don’t think your problem was stage fright. Or wedding fright. I think your problem was life fright.’

Hi Izzy, long time no chat. Miss you, friend. Would be WONDROUS to catch up. X She added another ‘X’ and sent it. Within a minute, Izzy had seen the message. Nora waited in vain for three dots to appear.

‘You don’t go to death. Death comes to you.’ Even death was something Nora couldn’t do properly, it seemed. It was a familiar feeling. This feeling of being incomplete in just about every sense. An unfinished jigsaw of a human. Incomplete living and incomplete dying.

When she thought about it – and increasingly she had been thinking about it – Nora was only able to think of herself in terms of the things she wasn’t. The things she hadn’t been able to become.

If you had done just one thing differently, you would have a different life story. And they all exist in the Midnight Library. They are all as real as this life.’ ‘Parallel lives?’ ‘Not always parallel. Some are more . . . perpendicular.

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

She never knowingly let go of the book, but there was a moment where she was no longer a person reading it, and a consequent moment where there was no book – or library – at all.

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.

But at the time she had viewed that not so much as a red flag but a green one.

Because of some strange predictive homesickness that festered alongside a depression that told her, ultimately, she didn’t deserve to be happy.

So, in effect, she swapped her best friend for a cat.

‘Beautiful Sky’. It was, she was convinced, the best song she had ever written. And – more than that – it was a happy song to reflect her optimism at that point in her life.

But the concern had been at least a little manipulative, now she thought about it.

‘Do you ever feel lucky to have me? Do you realise how close I was to leaving you, two days before the wedding? Do you know how messed up you would have been if I hadn’t turned up at the wedding?’ ‘Wow. Really? You have yourself in quite high esteem there, Nora.’ ‘Shouldn’t I? I mean, shouldn’t everyone? What’s wrong with self-esteem?

‘It’s hard to predict, isn’t it?’ she asked, looking blankly in front of her as she moved a black bishop across the board to take a white pawn. ‘The things that will make us happy.’

‘Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes. But I stand by what I said. It was a good choice. It just wasn’t a desired outcome.’

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.

‘Never underestimate the big importance of small things,’ Mrs Elm said. ‘You must always remember that.’

As if there was a very thin path to a happy life and it was the path he had decided for her. As if her own agency in her own life was automatically wrong.

Her Wikipedia page (she had a Wikipedia page!) informed her

The life goal!!!!!

‘People with stamina aren’t made any differently to anyone else,’ she was saying. ‘The only difference is they have a clear goal in mind, and a determination to get there. Stamina is essential to stay focused in a life filled with distraction. It is the ability to stick to a task when your body and mind are at their limit, the ability to keep your head down, swimming in your lane, without looking around, worrying who might overtake you . . .’

What is my goal?

Here, in this life she was in now, she had pursued a career to keep him happy, while sacrificing her own relationships, her own love of music, her own dreams beyond anything that didn’t involve a medal, her own life.

As she switched to freestyle 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. It wasn’t her fault her mother focused on her every flaw, starting with the asymmetry of her ears. No. It went back even earlier than that.

‘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.’

‘What do you mean? Are you okay today, sis? Are the new tablets working?’ ‘Tablets?’ She checked in her bag and started to rummage. Saw a small box of anti-depressants in her bag. Her heart sank.

Ooooo shes depressed in all the timelines!

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.

what we consider to be the most successful route for us to take, actually isn’t. Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. And we have all these metrics that we try and reach. When really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win.

Are there any other lives at all or is it just the furnishings that change?’

We’d just sit together, together but silent. Happy silent. Reading newspapers, drinking coffee.

I wanted somewhere where I didn’t have to feel his ghost. But the truth is, it only half-works, you know? Places are places and memories are memories and life is fucking life.’

Lives where she was playing music, or lying in a warm lavender-scented bath, or having incredible third-date sex, or reading on a beach in Mexico, or eating in a Michelin-starred restaurant, or strolling the streets of Paris, or getting lost in Rome, or tranquilly gazing at a temple near Kyoto, or feeling the warm cocoon of a happy relationship. In most lives, she would have at least been physically comfortable. And yet, she was feeling something new here.

She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true solitude.

the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it)

‘That’s why everyone hates each other nowadays,’ he reckoned. ‘Because they are overloaded with non-friend friends. Ever heard about Dunbar’s number?’

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.

‘It’s like how humans never see the second hand of a clock mid-tick,’ said Nora. ‘What?’ She saw that Hugo’s watch was of the analogue variety. ‘Try it. You just can’t. Minds can’t see what they can’t handle.’

‘I have been so many things. On every continent on Earth. And yet I have never found the life for me. I am resigned to being this way for ever. There will never be a life that I truly want to live for ever. I get too curious. I get too much of a yearning to live another way. And you don’t need to make that face. It’s not sad. I am happily in limbo.’

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

I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t. It probably wasn’t the best sign of how their nocturnal encounter was going, that she was thinking of Existential philosophy, or that this quote in particular was the one that appeared in her mind. But hadn’t Camus also said, ‘If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there’?

Except for a mesmerising milky way of camera flashes and phone torches.

distracted by a tattoo on her weirdly hairless forearm, written in beautifully angled calligraphic letters. It was a quote from Henry David Thoreau. All good things are wild and free.

Another print i want

You did the right thing, in the cosmic order of things. There is no rejection, there is only redirection. You know,

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.’

you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.’

‘But you did commit,’ said Mrs Elm, evidently having heard Nora’s thoughts. ‘And you survived.’

Every life she had tried so far since entering the library had really been someone else’s dream.

But entering a life wasn’t the same as entering an emotion.

Why Want Another Universe If This One Has Dogs?

AINT THAT THE TRUTH

Her social media activity wasn’t great in this life, which was always a promising sign,