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Voide 28：看完《午夜图书馆》，我懂得了 6 个人生道理

Voide 28：看完《午夜图书馆》，我懂得了 6 个人生道理

清明节前看完了 The Midnight Library（目前暂无译本），很感动，飞速地写完了英文的读书笔记。但到了中文，就拖拖拉拉到了这周。果然二语写作只是「写完」就觉得自己很棒，而母语写作还得「写好」才能够抵消掉内心批评的声音。感觉自己怎么也写不好了，所以直接把英文发出来。

The Midnight Library 是 Matt Haig 写的一本治愈系小说，2020 年获得了 Goodreads Best Books of 2020。在当时那种情况下，不难理解这本书为什么会收获好评。

说来也很奇妙，前两周翻译了《满足的多世界理论》，而这本小说的基本逻辑恰恰是基于多世界理论。

女主 Nora Seed 在她的原始世界（root life）中，本该是一个未来充满无限可能的人。她的游泳很好，有登上奥林匹克领奖台的潜质；她的音乐细胞也不错，加入的乐队 Labyrinths 差点就签了唱片公司；她曾经有很好的爱人，有好朋友在身边。

这些都是曾经。出现在故事开头的 Nora Seed 已经 35 岁了。她无父无母，与自己的哥哥不相往来，相依为命的猫被车撞死，最好的朋友也绝交了。这让她的抑郁症雪上加霜。当她决定自杀的那天，连在钢琴店卖钢琴的工作也没了——她没有任何活下去的理由了，于是她吞了大量的安眠药，企图自杀。

意外的是，她的意识并没有直接消失，而是来到了一座庞大的图书馆。图书管理员竟然就是她中学时期的图书管理员 Mrs. Elms，而 Mrs. Elms 告诉她，这座图书馆就是 Nora Seed 的多世界图书馆，每一本书就是 Nora 的一种可能的人生。

在 Mrs. Elms 的指引下，Nora 打开了她的后悔之书，想要在其他版本的人生里修正那些后悔作出的决定，也想要找到一个她真正想要活出来的样子。但在众多尝试之后，她最终明白了，即便那些人生都是「她」的人生，在其中生活的人也并不完全是「她」。只有当下的人生，这个「她」才是真实活着的。

以下是我从书中获得的 6 个启发。

  1. 我们会对很多事情感到后悔，但其中一些也许是基于误解的事实。

  2. 永远不要让你的生活成为他人实现梦想的工具。

  3. 你的选择也会影响他人的生活轨迹，所以做重大决定时，一定要三思。

  4. 活着就是受伤的过程，对你自己诚实，至少你可以选择承受那些你心甘情愿的伤害。

  5. 重要的不是你看到了什么，而是你怎么看待它们。这句是梭罗说的 :)。

  6. 你不需要理解生活，你只要好好生活就行了。

每条启发的具体阐释写在英文版本了，在此就不重述了。英文好的同学可以试试读一读这本书，语言很简单，但是很治愈。

The other day I finished the novel The Midnight Libary written by Hatt Maig. It’s a lovely story based on the theory of many worlds. Hugh Everett would be pissed off if he read this because this novel broke the law of never connecting two universes.

Here is a brief introduction to this novel.

Nora Seed, a girl with many possibilities, turned out to be an absolute failure when she was 35. She had no friends or parents or lovers. She was in a bad relationship with her elder brother. The only connection to her, the cat Voltaire, died of a car crash. And on the same day, she lost her job as a sale in an instrument shop.

Nora had depression. And all of these definitely increased her problem. So she decided to commit suicide. Instead of dying immediately, her awareness landed in a library where she found the librarian was Mrs. Elms, who was a librarian when Nora was in middle school. Mrs. Elms said this library was the library of Nora’s many lives, and each book was a possibility of Nora’s life.

So Nora tried her many lives in order to reduce her regrets and also to find a life she truly wanted to live. But in the end, she finally learned that there was not a life she truly wanted to live except the life she was truly in.

This book won the 2020 Goodreads Awards and it turned out to be a very reassuring novel. We all have situations when we feel that everything just went wrong and nothing is going to be okay. Depression and anxiety kill us. They make our lives dimmer and dull. We don’t know what to do. It seems that the door of possibilities is slammed in the face.

But this novel, which is full of philosophical words and comforting sentences, tells us that there still are possibilities as long as we are alive. And it tells us through the many lives of Nora Seed rather than some plain proverbs. So it makes the concept more acceptable. Just as the words in it: “Sometimes the only way to learn is to live”. Sometimes, the only way to be persuaded is to read stories.

And here are what I have learned after finishing this lovely novel.

  1. Sometimes the regrets are based on a load of shit rather than facts. Nora felt so painful and regretful when she saw her cat Voltaire died in a car crash. And in one of her many lives, she treated Voltaire better and kept him indoors all the time. But still, Voltaire died because of an illness. So this truth makes her regrets of “not being a good keeper” become totally nonsense. The death of Voltaire is not Nora’s fault. And it’s interesting sometimes when we have totally wrong perceptions but gain real emotions. Therefore, it is more important to distinguish the facts from the perceptions. Maybe what causes our emotions are just some imagination. It is not real at all.
  2. Don’t make your life a tool to achieve others’ dreams. There are many lives Nora all about others. In one life, she achieved her lover Dan’s dream of opening a pub. But later Dan turned out to be an alcoholic and had an affair with one of their pub employees. In another life, she achieved the dream of being an Olympic swimmer for her dad, whose affair made her mother depressed to die in advance. In one life, Nora achieved the dream of being in a successful band for her brother, who later died of an overdose in this life. And in these lives, Nora didn’t feel truly happy at all and she continuously hurt one or another. It’s hard to tell sometimes, to distinguish your dreams from others. The differences between them are so blurred. For example, Nora loved swimming and playing instruments, and singing. So in the library, she thoughts maybe it was not a bad idea to be an Olympic swimmer or a singer in a band. But she found herself absolutely wrong until she was really in these lives.
  3. Your choices influence others as well. So be careful at making big decisions. In Nora’s Olympic life, her brother gave up his dream of being a band guy. Instead, he became Nora’s manager. And her father, who died in middle school in Nora’s root life, was cheered up by Nora’s being an Olympic and found his true love. And in Nora’s plain professor life (actually also a happy life), she was not a seller in the instrument shop. A child who was born with some piano talents turned to be a thief because he could not find a cheap piano teacher like Nora in this life. Sometimes we take ourselves for granted. We think we are nobody. But trivial decisions have the butterfly effect as well. So just do something kind and nice to others. Maybe your decisions change their whole lives.
  4. To live sometimes means to hurt. So be honest with yourself. At least it means you can bear with the hurt. In Nora’s prodigious band life, her beloved brother died. And even though she was so successful, what was the meaning to live without kin? In the novel, Nora told Mrs. Elms that it was too hard to live without hurting people. And Mrs. Elms replied that death hurt people in fairness. In Scotts Peck’s The Road Less Travelled, he said life is full of pains. I can’t agree to it more. It’s true. Sometimes to live is to hurt, and to die is to hurt a lot. There is no way out of pains. So learn to enjoy it or choose some pains you can enjoy.
  5. It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. As we have mentioned before, our perceptions sometimes are not facts at all. But our emotions are intertwined with our perceptions. So being aware of our perceptions is vital. It is known that many celebrities are working on meditation such as Steve Jobs, Jordan, and more. Meditation is exactly a way of training our perceptions. We just focus on the present, the feelings, and the thoughts popping up. Practice by practice, we will find that there are lots of perceptions of one fact. If we can not know the fact, then we shape our perceptions.
  6. You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it. Finding the meaning of life is some nature deep-rooted in our hearts since the juvenile stage. We want to know who we are because we lack the awareness of who we are, and there are full of noises telling us who we should be. That’s why we are so desperate to understand life. We regard the meaning of life as a way out of pain in being alive. But when we focus on the pains, on the pursuit of the meaning in life, we forget to live our lives. The pains are not everything. “that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness.” Let go of the meaning of life, just live in the moment. You are alive, and you feel sad, painful, regretful, happy, angry, and more. Those are the elements of being alive.