Page 143 - The Midnight Library

www.urdukutabkhanapk.blogspot.com
www.urdukutabkhanapk.blogspot.com

‘Why is it always just one person that we see? In the place. e librar y.

Whatever.’
Hugo shrugged. ‘If I was religious, I’d say it was God. And as God is
probably someone we can’t see or comprehend then He – or She – or
whichever pronoun God is – becomes an image of someone good we have

known in our lives. And if I wasn’t religious – which I’m not – I would think
that the human brain can’t handle the complexity of an open quantum wave
function and so it organises or translates this complexity into somet hing it
understands. A librarian in a librar y. A friendly uncle in a video store. Et

cetera.’
Nora had read about multiverses and knew a bit about Gestalt psycholog y.
About how human brains take complex information about the world and
simplify it, so that when a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately

complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called ‘tree’. To be a
human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable
stor y that keeps things simple.
She knew that ever ything humans see is a simplification. A human sees

the world in three dimensions. at is a simplification. Humans are
fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who
straighten out cur ved streets in their minds, which explains why they get
lost all the time.

‘It’s like how humans never see the second hand of a clock mid-tick,’ said
Nora.
‘What?’
She saw that Hugo’s watch was of the analogue variety. ‘ Tr y it. You just

can’t. Minds can’t see what they can’t handle.’
Hugo nodded, as he obser ved his own watch.
‘So,’ Nora said, ‘whatever exists bet ween universes is most likely not a
librar y, but that is the easiest way for me to understand it. at would be my

hypothesis. I see a simplified version of the truth. e librarian is just a kind
of mental metaphor. e whole thing is.’
‘Isn’t it fascinating?’ said Hugo.
Nora sighed. ‘In the last life I spoke to my dead dad.’

Hugo opened a jar of coffee and scooped out granules into two mugs.
‘And I didn’t drink coffee. I drank peppermint tea.’
‘ at sounds terrible.’