Book #38: “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
Matt Haig
Released: May 9th, 2023
My 8th book for 2024 was Matt Haig’s “The Midnight Library”. I was recommended this book by my girlfriend when I was looking for the next book to read. I have many books lined up in queue. I have read quite a few biographies this year (with many more on the way) and wanted to read some fiction to change things up a bit. What I wasn't expecting, was this amazingly deep book to fall into my hands.
It's funny because I know people who struggle with life. I do it myself on occasion. Sometimes things are difficult. Stressful. Overbearing. Sometimes we just grapple with coming to terms with things that either do seem fair or do not make sense. I've never been suicidal, but there are certainly moments in every person's life where you get a sense of "this is too much for me to hold" and we feel the load of life slipping from our grasp. If this sounds familiar, do me a favor. Go to Amazon. Your local bookstore. The local library. Pick up a copy of this book and read it. You will thank me for it later.
There are times when I have wondered about life. What if I had chosen a different path? Reacted to something differently. Not met certain people. It's funny how life tends to chain-link itself together in such an odd way. I have had this dream before where we exist as intellectual beings on a greater plane. To gain knowledge, we go into this record store type place. The "records" are various lives we can choose to live. Once we choose one, we walk over to a machine and "live" the entirety of that life. We could live 100 years in the span of an instant second. Each "life" we live gives up greater wisdom and insight. I got this concept from Start Trek: The Next Generation's Season 5 episode, "The Inner Light". Captain Jean-Luc Picard is stuck in a beam sent out by a probe. He experiences 40 years of life in the span of about 30 minutes. He retains all memories and knowledge he acquired in those 40 years. It was intriguing, and if you haven't seen the episode, go check it out. It's not as sci-fi as you would expect and is a great take on life in a philosophical sense. It relates to this book because it feels like Nora (the main character) does something in a similar vein.
The first 30 pages are somewhat difficult to get into. Nora has a lot of demons she is facing, and her struggle to hold on to life is quite a depressing tale. I have heard from some other that this is where they fell off in reading it. I nearly joined them in this sentiment. However, once you get to the Midnight Library itself, things pick up drastically, and you will not be able to put the book down. Later on in the book, you fully understand the need to undertake such a negative trip through the early stages of the book. It took me 2 days to read it. I could have done it in less time given the chance, but wow...what a book.
Here is what I learned:
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- The book is dedicated to all health workers and the care workers.
- “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.” - Sylvia Plath
- “Between life and death there is a library, she said. And within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices ... Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”
- Nora Seed is nervous about taking her exams.
- Mrs. Elm is an elderly teacher who seems to be the only one on Nora’s level in the school.
- Nora has stopped swimming.
- She suffers from insecurities.
- She plays the electric piano.
- She lives in Apartment 33A.
- Ash is set to run in the Bedford Half Marathon.
- Nora has a ginger tabby cat named Voltaire but calls him Volts.
- Nora has been diagnosed with situational depression.
- She spent a year in London.
- She and her brother were in a band called The Labyrinths.
- Her brother now plays in a cover band called the Slaughterhouse Four.
- She called off her wedding to Dan two days before it was set to be.
- The Labyrinths had a deal with Universal ready to go before she backed out.
- “Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.”
- Her father passed away suddenly on a Rugby field at the school he taught at.
- “Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations.”
- In the first alternate life, she and Dan’s pub is called the Three Horseshoes.
- Dan wears a faded Jaws shirt that Nora bought him a decade earlier.
- Dan has alcoholism in both lives.
- Nora’s Penultimate Update before being found between life and death: Do you ever think 'how did I end up here?' Like you are in a maze and totally lost and it's all your fault because you were the one who made every turn? And you know that there are many routes that could have helped you out, because you hear all the people on the outside of the maze who made it through, and they are laughing and smiling. And sometimes you get a glimpse of them through the hedge. A fleeting shape through the leaves. And they seem so damn happy to have made it and you don't resent them, but you do resent yourself for not having their ability to work it all out. Do you? Or is this maze just for me?”
- Nora tells Mrs. Elm how she wants to die. Elm’s response is profound.
- “'Want, 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.”
- Nora’s second life is a short but normal one.
- “Sometimes the only way to learn is to live.”
- Blogger’s Note: The book is correct, grasshopper suicide is a thing you can Google.
- In her third alternate life, she lives in Sydney.
- Nora’s dad was very hard on her.
- In her fourth life, she is a swimmer.
- “If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. “And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise. Keep your head down. Keep your stamina. Keep swimming…”
- In her fifth alternate life, she is a glaciologist
- “When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is.”
- Instead of a Library, Huge sees a Video Store.
- In her sixth life, she is in her old band.
- There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe.”
- Her seventh life is at an animal shelter
- Dogs can often smell rain, so they head indoors if they believe it is coming.
- “Last Chance Saloon” Carrie’s an 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
- Never trust someone who is willingly rude to low-paid service staff.
- In her eighth life, Nora lives on a vineyard with a different spouse.
- She experiences thousands of other lives as she goes alone.
- Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.
- “We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it.”
- A “loo” is a British term for “bathroom” or “toilet”.
- A stomach gets a new lining every 4 days.
- Ear wax is a type of sweat.
- Humans have mites living in their eyelashes.
- Male ducks have penises shaped like corkscrews.
- Never underestimate the big importance of small things.
- It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
A Thing I have Learned
(By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)
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.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.
Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available.
We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like.
We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.
We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.
We only need to be one person.
We only need to feel one existence.
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.
So let's be kind to the people in our own existence. Let's occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.
Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And though today that same messy life seems just as messy, and I feel the weight of being, something has changed. I have found something within this darkness. Hope. Potential.
The doctor always told me my problem was situational and not clinical. And yet my situation hasn't changed. Neither really has my problem. My depression-prone brain remains. What changed was a chance to feel how every other situation could have been. I could tell you about it, but you would never believe me. All I can tell you is that there is only one thing that has changed. And yet that one thing was everything. I don't want to die any more. I hit rock bottom and found something solid there. I have lived a lot in what feels to you like a single night. I have travelled ten thousand miles from the inconceivable to the feasible. From death to life.
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.
Overall, I greatly enjoyed this book. I am giving this book my highest recommendation. I hope and pray it leads you to see life in a different sense. I hope the little things in your life become the things you treasure most of all. And always remember: Sometimes the only way to learn is to live.
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