Page 184 - The Midnight Library

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She straightened her back and stood up tall.

‘You need to choose more lives from the bottom or top shelves. You have
been seeking to undo your most obvious regrets. e books on the higher
and lower shelves are the lives a little bit further removed. Lives you are still
living in one universe or another but not ones you have been imagining or

mourning or thinking about. ey are lives you could live but never
dreamed of.’
‘So they’re unhappy lives?’
‘Some will be, some won’t be. It’s just they are not the most obvious lives.

ey are ones which might require a little imagination to reach. But I am
sure you can get there . . .’
‘Can’t you guide me?’
Mrs Elm smiled. ‘I could read you a poem. Librarians like poems.’ And

then she quoted Robert Frost. ‘ Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I
took the one less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference . . .’
‘What if there are more than two roads diverging in the wood? What if
there are more roads than trees? What if there is no end to the choices you

could make? What would Robert Frost do then?’
She remembered studying Aristotle as a first-year Philosophy student.
And being a bit depressed by his idea that excellence was never an accident.
at excellent outcomes were the result of ‘the wise choice of many

alternatives’. And here she was, in the privileged position of being able to
sample these many alternatives. It was a shortcut to wisdom and maybe a
shortcut to happiness too. She saw it now not as a burden but a gi to be
cherished.

‘Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs Elm, soly. ‘Look
at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a
beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a
move on that board, things change. ings begin to get more chaotic. And

that chaos builds with ever y single move you make.’
She took a seat at the chess table, opposite Mrs Elm. She stared down at
the board and moved a pawn two spaces for ward.
Mrs Elm mirrored the move on her side of the board.

‘It’s an easy game to play,’ she told Nora. ‘But a hard one to master. Ever y
move you make opens a whole new world of possibility.’
Nora moved one of her knights. ey progressed like this for a little while.