The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

‘Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices…Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’

She didn’t tell him that while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond. According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.

You lose your job, then more shit happens.

‘Bands don’t last. We’d have been a meteor shower. Over before we started.’ ‘Meteor showers are fucking beautiful.’

There was an old musician’s cliché, about how there were no wrong notes on a piano. But her life was a cacophony of nonsense. A piece that could have gone in wonderful directions, but now went nowhere at all.

‘Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices…Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’

‘You don’t go to death. Death comes to you.’

‘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.’ ‘Sounds hard.’

‘No. Not instantaneously. As with Voltaire, the only lives available here are, well, lives. I mean, you could die in that life, but you won’t have died before you enter the life because this Midnight Library is not one of ghosts. It is not a library of corpses. It is a library of possibility. And death is the opposite of possibility. Understand?’

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

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.’

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. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other.

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

She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.

‘I just don’t understand life,’ sulked Nora. ‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’

And when she thought of her root life, the fundamental problem with it, the thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love.

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.