The Midnight Library

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

—Henry David Thoreau

Nora Seed didn't have a good day.

She lost her dear cat and then lost her job at the guitar store. She believed that her life was chaos.

She hadn't talked to her brother for a long time and simply did not how to. She felt that she let everyone around her down.

She thought herself was the probelm, causing her to suffer and drown in disappointments.

At the end of this day, midnight.

'She knew only one thing with absolute certainty: she didn't want to reach tomorrow. She stood up. She found a pen and a piece of paper.

It was, she decided, a good time to die.'

And she took her own life.

Wait, so this is the end...? Nora lived a life of regrets and unhappiness, no idea how to make up for her loss or how to move on. Is death the only possible solution to her miserable life?

Or...was her life really as miserable as she believed to be?

This is where the journey at Midnight Library began.

Midnight Library is a library of possibilities.

'Midnight Library is not one of ghosts. It is not a library of corpses. It is a library of possibilities. And death is the opposite of possibilities.'

Nora entered the Midnight Library, a quite old-fashioned library ( full of books of course), and welcomed by Mrs Elm, the librarian from her old school.

Magically, Nora could re-think all of her regrets in her past life, turn life and live in a life where she could have made a different decision. Exactly like the Schrödinger's Cat situation.

The cat in the box is both alive and dead.

'In quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once. In the same place. Quantum superposition. The cat in the box is both alive and dead. You could open the box and see that it was alive or dead, that's how it goes, but in one sense, even after the box is open, the cat is both alive and dead. Every universe exists over every other universe. Like a million pictures on tracing paper, all with slight variations within the same frame. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests there are infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make. And traditionally it was thought that there could be no communication or transference between those worlds, even though they happen in the same space, eveb though they happen literally millimetres away from us.'

Revenge of Schrödinger's Cat

As the cat in Schrödinger's box was immersing itself in maths and preparing for a revenge (kidding), Nora entered her journey on exploring her parallel lives.

What if I didn't disappoint my dad?

Nora was the best at swimming when she was a kid, an extension of her dad's old athletic dream. She had the potential at winning Olympics. When she turned a teenager, she finally told her dad that she would quit swimming, which she no longer felt happiness and motivations from. Her dad's disappintment had been haunting her since that day.

When Nora entered the life where she pursued swimming dream (more accurately, her dad's dream), she realized that she also had attempted suicide. Living a successful athlete with two Olympic gold medals didn't make her happier. She was still struggling to please her dad. To live a life for her dad's praise on the sacrifice of her own life and other people's happiness, Nora realised that this life was messed=up either.

What if I said yes to marriage?

Is marriage really something that people do at the appropriate time with the nearest availbale person?

But how about #YOLO, to live and love freely? 'To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are literally three-parts dead.' --Bertrand Russell.

Wait...'Betrand Russell had more marriages and affairs than hot dinners, so perhaps he was not the one to give advice.'

Nora was engaged to Dan few years ago, charmed and overwhelmed by his enthusiasm and dream on opening a bar in an English town. But her mom passed away three months before her wedding day, drowned in anxiety and depression, she felt that her life was out of control. The only things controllable was to withdraw the engagement and cancel the wedding, and so she did. She said no to her closest chance to marriage.

In the life where she married Dan and ran a bar, her marriage life wasn't as good and sweet as she expected. She was also bored and exhausted from the marriage life arguments and never-stopping bar stuff. She was also seeking help from meditation, couple counsellor (Dan cheated...) and a little bit more appreciation from her husband. It was not the life she imagined it to be.

What if I chose another career, saved my cat, stayed in my brother's band, etc.?

Nora travelled to many different parallel universes and had chances to live every possible lives. She became a glaciologist, met her cat alive again, turned into a famous singer,etc. But somehow, in each life, something was missing. No life was perfect. Oddly, by living in each life, Nora found hope and reflected on herself again--Maybe her real life wasn't that bad. And why the hell did she ever have to live up to the expectations of people around her, dad, brother, Dan, best friend, etc.?

It wasn't the situations and chemistried that changed; it was her perspectives.

She wanted something different in herself, like to accpet herself completely. 'Every mistake she has ever made. Every mark on her boday. Every dream she ahdn't reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed.' She imagined accepting them all.

'And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.'

While Nora was struggling with regrets and couldn't figure out why in a parallel universe, she was still miserable, Mrs Elm told her 'you don't have to understand life; you just have to live it'. Just like Christopher Nolan's philosophy in the film Tenet, 'don't try to understand it, feel it'.

Don't understand it, feel it--Do you really fancy sodas?

Thoreau's quote 'It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see' was throughout this book. It did remind me of a sentence from the book The Little Prince.

'And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.'

The author was trying to pass a simple life tip for all the readers: Don't overlook and underestimate the importance of small things that bring us joy and happiness. The cherry on top of a cake, the first bite of watermelon in summer, the fresh smell of grass after rain...Our happiness is made of all these joyful moments, and we can catch them only with observation and our hearts.

Author Matt Haig discusses his brilliant new novel, The Midnight Library, describing it as his ‘love letter to libraries’.