The Midnight Library

It was hard not to compare Mrs Elm to her mother, who treated Nora like a mistake in need of correction.

She was a waterfall of apologies. She was drowning in herself.

‘Well, that was terrible.’ Mrs Elm smiled, wryly. ‘It just shows you, doesn’t it?’

‘Shows me what?’

‘Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes.’

‘The rook is my favourite piece,’ she said. ‘It’s the one that you think you don’t have to watch out for. It is straightforward. You keep your eye on the queen, and the knights, and the bishop, because they are the sneaky ones. But it’s the rook that often gets you. The straightforward is never quite what it seems.’

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.

To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.

I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other.

But where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them.

Nora wanted to live in a world where no cruelty existed, but the only worlds she had available to her were worlds with humans in them.

In one life she spent all day arguing with people she didn’t know on Twitter and ended a fair proportion of her tweets by saying ‘Do better’ while secretly realising she was telling herself to do that.

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

Nora’s Conclusion

We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite.