The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

Only the sertraline stopped her crying. ‘Oh God.’

A soul-sickness festered within her. Her mind was throwing itself up. She widened her smile.

The woman – blonde bob, bottle tan – was happy and casual and relaxed in a way Nora no longer knew how to be.

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

Three hours before she decided to die, her whole being ached with regret, as if the despair in her mind was somehow in her torso and limbs too. As if it had colonised every part of her.

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

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

‘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.’

The thing she had once loved about swimming was the disappearing. In the water, her focus had been so pure that she thought of nothing else.

The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing.

‘Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes.

Fish get depressed when they have a lack of stimulation. A lack of everything. When they are just there, floating in a tank that resembles nothing at all.

‘The only way to learn is to live.’

It felt so empowering, to be that fit and strong and to have such mastery of the water, that she momentarily stopped worrying about her father and having to give a speech she really wasn’t prepared for.

This must be the hardest bit about being a spy, she thought. The emotion people store in you, like a bad investment. You feel like you are robbing people of something.

And yet, she was feeling something new here. Or something old that she had long buried. The glacial landscape reminded her that she was, first and foremost, a human living on a planet. Almost everything she had done in her life, she realised – almost everything she had bought and worked for and consumed – had taken her further away from understanding that she and all humans were really just one of nine million species.

‘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.’

the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became.

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

Roger ...

She checked her phone but there was no signal.

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

maybe the problem with her root life had partly been its blandness.

She had come to imagine mediocrity and disappointment were her destiny.

Maybe it wasn’t the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother’s parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place.

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.

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. Her parents, who both had their own insecurities, had encouraged that idea.

All have had a deep desire to have done things differently. They had regrets. Some contemplated that they may be better off dead but also had a desire to live as another version of themselves.’

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

It seems that you have spent all your life saying things that you aren’t really thinking. This is one of your barriers.’ ‘Barriers?’ ‘Yes. You have a lot of them. They stop you from seeing the truth.’ ‘About what?’

She realised, in that moment, that she was capable of a lot more than she had known.

All good things are wild and free.

As she sang, she felt alive. Even more alive than she had felt swimming in her Olympic-champion body.

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.’

the game is never over until it is over.

Caught in the middle. Struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.

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

And being a bit depressed by his idea that excellence was never an accident.

‘It’s an easy game to play,’ she told Nora. ‘But a hard one to master. Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibility.’

There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe.

Her mind felt different here. She thought a lot in this life, but her thoughts were gentle.

‘Compassion is the basis of morality,’ the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had written, in one of his softer moments.

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.

It was a curious fact that no matter how many lives she had experienced, and no matter how different those lives were, she almost always had her phone by the bed. And in this life, it was no different, so she grabbed it and sneaked out of the room quietly.

infant

Almost annoyingly good. A good life with a good daughter and a good man in a good house in a good town.

were very much like a living endorsement for marriage.

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. As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’ And Ash only saw the Nora he had fallen in love with and married, and so, in a way, that was the Nora she was becoming.

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

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.