The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

Nora’s mind grew heavier at the idea her brother might feel like she

did.

‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,’ Thoreau had said. ‘Live the life you’ve imagined.’

She was drowning in herself.

voice, she realised, didn’t sound like she remembered. It sounded emptier. A bit colder. Maybe it was tiredness. Maybe it was stress. Maybe it was beer. Maybe it was marriage.

Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.

She had shrunk for him, but he still hadn’t found the space he needed. No more.

Maybe life was automatically better when the sun shone so confidently in April.

dreaming of things they would hate if they actually got them. And how many were pushing other people into their delusional idea of happiness?

you can choose choices but not outcomes.

Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.

Nora had no idea what success was. She had felt like a failure for so long.

She didn’t want to be confronted with that long interminable list of mistakes and wrong turns again. She was depressed enough.

‘How we live it all at once. In a straight line. But really that’s not the whole picture. Because life isn’t simply made of the things we do, but the things we don’t do too. And every moment of our life is a…kind of turning.’

everything differently. Actions can’t be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try…’

‘Is happiness the aim?’

also getting used to life’s disappointments,

and had consequently believed marriage was something that was not only inevitable, but also inevitably miserable.

He then became a PE teacher and simmered with quiet resentment at the universe.

Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty.

Nora had always had a problem accepting herself. From as far back as she could remember, she’d had the sense that she wasn’t enough.

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.’

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

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

is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness.

just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.

excellent outcomes were the result of ‘the wise choice of many alternatives’.

‘Compassion is the basis of morality,’

but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery. That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair. Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.

She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.

There was a net of love to break her fall.

Because now she saw the kinds of things she could do when she put herself to work.

What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. She didn’t need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy.

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

It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays.

Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.

how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.