From my bookshelf: The Midnight Library

One of the things I love about life is the infinite possibilities it holds. As a kid, I used to marvel at all the people I could be, all the futures I could have. They were magical what-ifs, shimmering with possibility. A quarter of a century later, my path in life has become more defined. I have made choices, and they have had consequences. But the dreamer in me often wonders: What if I had instead done this? Or that other thing? Maybe I would have become like this other person. And these what-ifs have gradually become tinted with regret. Not because I don't like where I am today, but because I had to give up all the alternate realities I could have inhabited to be here. That every choice meant that I had to leave behind the rest. I have previously written about this in an Obscure Sorrows post called Onism.

A few years ago, I struggled reading Plath's Bell Jar, because I felt sad looking at life with that perspective. A paragraph that particularly caught my attention was this:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

Then, this year, I stumbled upon The Midnight Library. The premise of the book is that between life and death there is a library with an infinite number of books that stand for the innumerable paths one's life could take. By borrowing one of these books, one could visit that particular life. I was drawn in by this notion, because just like the depressed protagonist, I have often pondered upon my regrets and what-ifs. I have wondered what the best variation of my life would look like, and how far away from that the current version is. So I read on with curiosity, glimpsing the many varied lives the protagonist could have had, and marveling at how different they were from one another. Some I delighted in, others I was amused by, and certain others I tutted at in dismay. I thought the objective was to find the best life she could have had.

But soon, this book took on a more philosophical and profound turn. It addressed the topic of regrets, and how we mourn all the lives we could have had. Through the protagonist's numerous existences, it makes a powerful argument on the possibilities that the one life we are given holds for us. Quoting a couple of favorite paragraphs:

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret and keep regretting, ad infinitude until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”

“We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”

For me, reading this book was an amazing experience. It taught me so much about all the regrets I have, and all the what-ifs I wonder about. I loved the conviction it brought me at the end that this one life was enough to explore everything I wanted to. Great read, and would recommend this for anyone who feels like life is too limiting.