The Midnight Library

Highlights

Page 31

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

Page 49

There were books either side of the bed. In her actual life she hadn’t had a book by her bed for at least six months. She hadn’t read anything for six months. Maybe in this life she had a better concentration span.

Page 58

‘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.’

Page 63

‘So, you see? Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just …’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.’ Nora tried to think back to her schooldays, to remember if Mrs Elm had said the word ‘bullshit’ before, and she was pretty sure she hadn’t. ‘But I still don’t get why you let me go into that life if you knew Volts was going to be dead anyway? You could have told me. You could have just told me I wasn’t a bad cat owner. Why didn’t you?’ ‘Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’

Page 113

‘So, you want me to find that life for you?’ Nora sighed. She still had no idea what she wanted. But at least the Arctic Circle would be different. ‘All right. Yes.’

Note: She is unhappy in these lives that she tries, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the version of her who’s native to that timeline would be unhappy. For example, she can’t handle the Svalbard cold, making her unhappy. But the version of her who had spent years studying glaciers would be bothered less by the cold.

She’s comparing her circumstances with the circumstances of other versions of herself, but ultimately her root personality and experiences and body might be the limiting factor. Maybe this root version of her is unable to be happy, no matter where she goes.

Another limitation is that parachuting in prevents her from fully accepting her situation. She enjoyed the body that was fit and capable of swimming laps. She’d enjoy it a lot more if she had earned that body through hard work rather than being given it. She found it hard to cope with any of the deaths she discovered, but all deaths of loved ones are hard to cope with initially. It’s only time that heals it. She isn’t equipped to deal with the sudden grief like the native version is.

Page 121

fortissimo,

Page 122

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.

Note: That’s a pretty good challenge to my views. I’ve only ever lived in big cities, so it makes sense I’d think this way.

Page 126

A Moment of Extreme Crisis in the Middle of Nowhere ‘Oh fuck,’ whispered Nora, into the cold.

Note: This is the entire chapter. Not a fan of these tiny chapters. Back in my day chapters meant something! Now we have these young un calling a sentence a chapter.

Page 130

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. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

Note: It’s fashionable now to shit on people who want to travel, but this is one of the benefits of travel.

Page 133

Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.

Page 147

‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’ he said, wisely.

Page 175

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.’

Page 200

‘I love this place,’ Dylan said now, looking around at the busy, garish red-and-yellow décor. Nora wondered, quietly, if there was any place Dylan didn’t or wouldn’t love. He seemed like he would be able to sit in a field near Chernobyl and marvel at the beautiful scenery.

Page 211

It was as though she had reached some state of acceptance about life – that if there was a bad experience, there wouldn’t only be bad experiences. 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. That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair. 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. But with every life she saw that metaphorical door widen a little further as she grew better at using her imagination.

Page 211

Sometimes she was in a life for less than a minute, while in others she was there for days or weeks. It seemed the more lives she lived, the harder it was to feel at home anywhere.

Note: I saw this coming.

Page 215

‘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.”’

Page 252

A few years ago his mum Doreen had come into String Theory to buy her son a cheap keyboard. She’d been worried about his behaviour at school and he’d expressed an interest in music and so she wanted to get him piano lessons. Nora explained she had an electric piano, and could play, but had no formal teacher training. Doreen had explained she didn’t have much money but they struck a deal, and Nora had enjoyed her Tuesday evenings teaching Leo the difference between major and minor seventh chords and thought he was a great boy, eager to learn. Doreen had seen Leo was ‘getting caught up in the wrong set’, but when he got into music he started doing well in other things too. And suddenly he wasn’t getting into trouble with teachers any more, and he’d play everything from Chopin through Scott Joplin to Frank Ocean and John Legend and Rex Orange County with the same care and commitment. Something Mrs Elm had said on an early visit to the Midnight Library came to her. 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 …

Note: Reminds me of 11.22.1963 and perhaps something else? Maybe a movie where small decisions make changes to the environment.

Page 265

She didn’t want to die. And she didn’t want to live any other life than the one that was hers. The one that could be a messy struggle, but it was her messy struggle. A beautiful messy struggle.

Note: This is what I realised early. Even the happiest outcomes would feel unearned. Skipping all the tough parts, like that Adam Sandler movie.

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