The Midnight Library

By Matt Haig

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.

The Midnight Library is an irresistible opening to the human question ‘what if.’ It is irresistible to me because I have often found myself driving along or running the vacuum and allowed my mind a brief foray into regret or ‘the impossible to know.’ What if I had married the other guy who had wanted to marry me rather than Roy? What if I had taken the job with an international aid organization with much less flexibility, rather than the writing job which allowed me to live wherever I wanted to? What if I had walked into the master bathroom just a few minutes earlier on the day of Roy’s death?

As Haig’s protagonist eventually reminds us...it can drive you insane thinking of the other lives we don’t live.

And yet.

Haig invites us into the world of possible universes where a single action (or lack of action) can turn our lives in a new direction. He says it so much better than I can, so here is a summary of the journey this book explores:

‘Life is strange,’ she said. ‘How we live it all at once. In a straight line. But really that’s not the whole picture. Because life isn’t simply made of things we do, but the things we don’t do too. And every moment of our life is a…kind of turning. Think about it. Think about how we start off…as this set thing. Like the seed of a tree planted in the ground. And then we…we grow…we grow..and at first we are a trunk. But then the tree—the tree that is our life—develops branches. And think of all those branches, departing from the trunk at different heights. And think of all those branches, branching off again, heading in often opposing directions. Think of those branches becoming other branches and those becoming twigs. And think of the end of each of those twigs, all in different places, having started from the same one. A life is like that, but on a bigger scale. New branches are formed every second of every day. And from our perspective—from everyone’s perspective—it feels like a…like a continuum. Each twig has travelled only one journey. But there are still other twigs. And there are also other todays. Other lives that would have been different if you’d taken different directions earlier in your life. This is a tree of life. Lots of religions and mythologies have talked about the tree of life. It’s there in Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity.

By following Haig’s protagonist Nora through a few of the infinitely possible variations of her life, I got to see the allure of recreating a past choice through the lens of a fairy tale outcome. I saw how as I explored the possible alternate turns my life could have taken, I could succumb to the temptation to make those lives the ones where everything worked out. Where the fairy tale outcome took place and I lived happily ever after. Haig invited me to dance with possibility and regret. For the life I actually chose to live, decision by decision, came filled with regrets. And the life I didn’t choose to live, still held all of the lure of unfulfilled potential.

And I saw what a dangerous trap that could become. Because unengaged potential always carries a rosy glow of expectation. And no lived reality can occur without the experience of regret. But then he reminds me of compassion. Compassion, for me, must be that place where I stand in the present. Where I can dip into regrets and forgive myself. Where I can let go of potential and trust myself to continue moving forward. To continue allowing the tree to branch out, to grow and blossom and yes die so that another branch might emerge.

I found Nora’s experience echoed in my own.

So, in time, and with Mrs. Elm’s assistance, Nora took lots of books from the shelves, and ended up having a taste of lots of different lives in her search for the right one. She learned that undoing regrets was really a way of making wishes come true.

Because perhaps there is no ‘right one’ when it comes to a life lived. How could there be? As I embrace compassion as a way of living for myself, I find that I am more generous in extending it to others. I also find more courage to allow myself the necessary failures of growth. And I really resonate with Haig’s comparison of life to chess.

She [Nora] took a seat at the chess table, opposite Mrs Elm. She stared down at the board and moved a pawn two spaces forward. Mrs Elm mirrored the move on her side of the board. ‘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.’