Page 124 - The Midnight Library

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‘If one advances confidently,’ oreau had written in Walden, ‘in the

direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has
imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’ He’d
also obser ved that part of this success was the product of being alone. ‘I
never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.’

And Nora felt similarly, in that moment. Although she had only been le
alone for an hour at this point, she had never experienced this level of
solitude before, amid such unpopulated nature.
She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was

the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true solitude. e lonely
mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-
human connection is the point of ever ything. But amid pure nature (or the
‘tonic of wildness’ as oreau called it) solitude took on a different character.

It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection bet ween herself and
the world. And between her and herself.
She remembered a conversation she’d had with Ash. Tall and slightly
awkward and cute and forever in need of a new songbook for his guitar.

e chat hadn’t been in the shop but in the hospital, when her mother was
ill. Shortly aer discovering she had ovarian cancer, she had needed surger y.
Nora had taken her mum to see all the consultants at Bedford General
Hospital, and she had held her mum’s hand more in those few weeks than in

all the rest of their relationship put together.
While her mum was undergoing surger y, Nora had waited in the hospital
canteen. And Ash – in his scrubs, and recognising her as the person he’d
chatted to on many occasions in String eor y – saw she looked worried

and popped in to say hi.
He worked at the hospital as a general surgeon, and she’d ended up asking
him lots of questions about the sort of stuff he did (on that particular day
he’d removed an appendix and a bile duct). She also asked about normal

post-surger y recover y time and procedure times, and he had been ver y
reassuring. ey’d ended up talking for a ver y long time about all sorts of
things, which he seemed to sense she’d been in need of. He’d said somet hing
about not over-googling health symptoms. And that had led to them talking

about social media – he believed that the more people were connected on
social media, the lonelier society became.