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 different if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’

‘It just shows you, doesn’t it?’ ‘Shows me what?’ ‘Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes.

in quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once. In

they say sibling rivalry isn’t about siblings but parents,

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

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

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

‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, that same messy life seems full of hope. Potential. The impossible, I suppose, happens via living. Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No. But do I want to live? Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.

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

And it was different because she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfilment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself.

Mrs Elm’s eyes sparkled with sudden life. ‘Well, that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.’