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.

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

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

His enthusiasm had been infectious, and it had almost become her dream too.

This was a life where she put four exclamation marks in a row. That was probably what happier, less uptight people did.

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.

‘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,

Weirdly, she felt just as sad for the version of her who had never fallen in love with the simple beauty of Thoreau’s Walden, or the stoical Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, as she had felt sympathy for the version of her who never fulfilled her Olympic potential.

‘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.’

The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.

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.

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.’

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.

Their winery was called the Buena Vista vineyard, situated in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and they had a child called Alejandro, who was at boarding school near Monterey Bay.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with this life, but she felt inside her a craving for other things, other lives, other possibilities. She felt like she was still in the air, not ready to land.

‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’

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.