The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

‘Well, far be it from me to say, but there is more to this world than swimming really fast. There are many different possible lives ahead of you.

She knew she should be experiencing pity and despair for her feline friend – and she was – but she had to acknowledge something else. As she stared at Voltaire’s still and peaceful expression – that total absence of pain – there was an inescapable feeling brewing in the darkness. Envy.

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

The Only Way to Learn Is to Live

‘Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’

It is a library of possibility. And death is the opposite of possibility.

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

She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true 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.

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

‘Schrödinger’s life. Both dead and alive in your own mind.’

‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’ he said, wisely. ‘You’re quoting Camus.’ ‘You got me.’

And then she quoted Robert Frost. ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the one less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference . . .’

‘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.

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.’

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

I AM ALIVE.

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