The Midnight Library

“Three hours before she decided to die, her whole being ached with regret, as if the despair in her mind was somehow in her torso and limbs too. As if it had colonised every part of her.” 

Nora likens despair here to a physical disease that colonizes her body like cancer cells. At the end of the novel, Nora learns an important lesson about despair: Despair makes one feel like there is no way out, even when there is a way. Despair thrives on false conviction, and Nora once convinced herself that life was pointless.

“A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole.” 

Nora makes a comparison between a person and a city when defending her love of Dan. There were red flags concerning Dan’s character, but Nora chose to ignore them because she saw other, more desirable parts of the “city” to like. As with a city, one tends to stay away from the bad parts and focus on the good places.

“The art of swimming—she supposed like any art—was about purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else.”

Though Nora once loved swimming and occasionally still likes to swim, she realizes that there is a dedication and purity to swimming that she didn’t have when she competed professionally. However, when she swims in other lives, she focuses so much on the task of swimming that, like an artform, she pushes out everything else by engaging wholly with the art itself and not the outside pressures (like who she might be or whether she’s the best).

“The straightforward is never quite what it seems.” 

Mrs. Elm makes this statement when lecturing Nora on chess. Mrs. Elm contends that people never worry about the rook, but the rook, as a straightforward piece, can be as worthy a foe as a knight or queen. The quote suggests that people never consider the simple or straightforward routes because they expect them to be dull or boring.

“She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true solitude.” 

Back in Nora’s root life, she thought her loneliness was the prime reason behind her despair. However, like the Thoreau quote referenced here, solitude in nature reinvigorates people. Alone in the Arctic Circle, Nora faces real, raw solitude and feels part of nature for the first time.

“The quiet made her realise how much noise there was elsewhere in the world. Here, noise had meaning. You heard something and you had to pay attention.” 

Along with solitude, Nora learns a valuable lesson about noise while studying glaciers in the Arctic Circle. Every day in Svalbard is a battle with the elements, and often a battle between life and death. Nora and her colleagues must pay attention to every noise because some noise, like that of an approaching polar bear, could signal death. This realization also underscores for Nora how much white noise is part of everyday life.

“And it became astoundingly clear to her, finally, in that moment: She didn’t want to die. And that was the problem. In the face of death, life seemed more attractive, and as life seemed more attractive, how could she get back to the Midnight Library?” 

Faced with a gruesome death from a polar bear, Nora finally cherishes life. However, she only returns to the Midnight Library when disappointed with life. Since the polar bear is frightening but not disappointing, she must find another way to extricate herself from the experience. She eventually gathers the courage to scare away the polar bear.

“To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.”

Nora learns an important lesson in Svalbard: To accept nature and the solitude it brings is to accept her place in the circle of life. Moreover, accepting the world means living intently in the world despite bad times and not throwing her life away.

“She had come to imagine mediocrity and disappointment were her destiny.” 

Nora not only believed that she was living a failed life, but she also believed that failure and disappointment were traits passed down from her parents and ancestors. Nora therefore thought that failure existed on a cellular level inside her very being.

“Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. […] 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.” 

Nora has a cathartic moment here when she sees life as an undulating wave. She accepts the ups and downs as just moments in a life, and that all these ups and downs add up to life itself. This type of existence means she simply exists to experience what life can offer.

“No, the shock was that she felt like she was about to live. Or at least, that she could imagine wanting to be alive again. And she wanted to do something good with that life.” 

Nora’s colleagues believe she is in shock from her near-death experience with the polar bear, and she’s mostly happy about this impression because it gives her an excuse not to talk about glaciers and give herself away by her lack of knowledge. Nora feels shock here because she now wants not only to live but to live a meaningful life.

“She imagined accepting it all. […] She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying their best. And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.” 

Nora accepts life on life’s terms, meaning she accepts the ups and downs of existence. In doing so, she also accepts that she is but one of many sentient species trying to exist on earth. She finds freedom in not positioning herself as the center of everything, which is a conceit humankind often engages in and then suffers from due to the weight of such a position.

“Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.” 

Humankind often suffers more than necessary because people tend to suffer alone. Nora, for instance, lived a quiet life and felt she had no place in the world. When humankind seeks out connection to others, however, and when people voice what’s ailing them, this act of connecting and truth telling helps people realize they aren’t alone in the world and that they’re not alone in their feelings.

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

Nora thinks about psychology in this quote. Specifically, she considers how humans must take complex information and reassemble it into a simplified form to better understand it. Because of this process, humans sometimes lose sight of the world’s grandeur due to translation issues. Nora thinks about how complex a tree is, yet humans simply call it “tree” without considering all its parts.

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

Hugo tells Nora about their condition as sliders, or people in between life and death. Despite their chance at experiencing infinite lives, Hugo warns Nora that the trick is embracing the experience itself and not focusing solely on finding meaning for everything.

“‘I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths,’ she said, realising something for the first time. ‘But maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths.’” 

Though hesitant to speak on a podcast in Brazil, Nora begins thinking about her experiences thus far and comes to several realizations. In her root life, she thought that there was a better path and wanted out of her path in Bedford. She now thinks that perhaps there is just life, and life includes the easy moments and the hard moments.

“You need to realise something if you are ever to succeed at chess […] the game is never over until it is over. It isn’t over if there is a single pawn still on the board.” 

Mrs. Elm gives Nora another lesson in living. A chess player would never call the game until there was no other move left on the board. Similarly, Nora shouldn’t call her life quits when there are so many options left for her to explore.

“You didn’t have to enjoy every aspect of each life to keep having the option of experiencing them. You just had to never give up on the idea that there would be a life somewhere that could be enjoyed.” 

Though Nora considers the above quote while thinking about her chance to explore the various versions of herself, the quote also speaks to Nora’s root life. Life is about experiencing everything life has to offer. The trick in not giving in to despair is to remember that there is always something to experience and enjoy; it’s an exercise in changing one’s mindset.

“She learned that undoing regrets was really a way of making wishes come true.” 

The Book of Regrets is initially a harsh, difficult concept for Nora. The book contains all the tender, hurtful moments in her life. As Nora progresses through different lives, however, she learns that regrets are like wishes; when she rectifies the circumstances around a regret, she essentially makes a past wish come true. For instance, she regrets not being a good cat owner, but once she realizes she was always a great cat owner, her wish of being good to Voltaire comes true in her mind.

“That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair.” 

Nora eventually understands that the difference between fear and despair is a matter of conviction. If she’s afraid, she simply sees the potential for a negative outcome. Despair, however, happens when her mind traps itself in a negative outcome and doesn’t see a way out. Depression, like despair, happens when one repeatedly convinces oneself that there is no alternative to the present dilemma (or feeling or conflict).

“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.” 

This quote harkens back to what Hugo tried to tell Nora in Svalbard. Life shouldn’t be about breaking it down and understanding every detail of why one lives. Life should be about experiencing as much as possible while understanding that there are good and bad times and that one learns from all these things.

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

In this quote, Nora worries about not seeing a book due to darkness, but Mrs. Elm reminds her that her experience lies within. She can therefore perceive the book without seeing it. Mrs. Elm imparts this wisdom to Nora via a concept about perception from Thoreau. The basic premise is that humans only perceive life through experience, and that perception comes from within. Therefore, it’s how one views life that matters more than what one is looking at.

“And when she thought of her root life, the fundamental problem with it, the thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love.” 

All of Nora’s querying of her lives eventually reveals that she lacks love. She never knew why things never worked out for her, and here, in this life with a loving husband and child, Nora knows that connection and love both from and for others is the root of happiness.