The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

‘You don’t go to death. Death comes to you.’ Even death was something Nora couldn’t do properly, it seemed.

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.

‘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.’

‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.’

‘Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.’

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

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.

‘That’s why everyone hates each other nowadays,’ he reckoned. ‘Because they are overloaded with non-friend friends.

To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.

In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.’

‘Not really. I am happy here. Why want another universe if this one has dogs?

She had known three types of silence in relationships. There was passive-aggressive silence, obviously, there was the we-no-longer-have-anything-to-say silence, and then there was the silence that Eduardo

and she seemed to have cultivated. The silence of not needing to talk. Of just being together, of together-being. The way you could be happily silent with yourself.

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.

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

‘We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’

‘Kindness is a strong force.’ ‘And rare.’

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.

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.