Summary
Nora speaks with Mrs. Elm about how this process is becoming too painful for her. There is a brief earthquake and Mrs. Elm reminds her that the existence of this library hinges entirely on her being willing to live. If she dies, Mrs. Elm says, it will cease to exist and all of her possible lives will end with the termination of her primary one. Using a chess metaphor, Mrs. Elm reminds Nora that even pawns have the potential to be queens, meaning every small decision could profoundly change her life for the better. She encourages her to keep searching.
Nora reflects on a time as a child when she attempted to swim across a fast-flowing river to impress some of her brother's friends. She nearly drowned, but she still managed to get to the other side, intact. Mrs. Elm tells her that this decisive action saved her once and has the potential to save her again, if she can follow through with it.
She tells Nora that she needs to live some of the lives from the lower shelves, where she makes less obvious adjustments to smaller regrets. She returns to the idea that a chess game generates an incredibly complex series of relationships as soon as one piece is moved, meaning it contains great potential for change. Nora expresses a desire for a "gentle" life and is sent to it.
In this life, she works at an animal shelter with her boyfriend, Dylan. She takes care of dogs and has a fairly quiet and unassuming existence. She and Dylan have lunch and she realizes that they went to elementary school together. They go to a Mexican restaurant later that night and go home and watch a Ryan Bailey movie together. While this life makes Nora feel relatively content, she feels that the version of herself that actually chose it deserved to experience for herself. She leaves and returns to the library once again.
Inspired by a wine label from her previous life, Nora decides to explore a life in which she owns a vineyard. In this timeline, she is married to a Mexican winemaker who she met during a gap year trip. They live in California and operate their business together. While relatively happy in this life, she begins to find that her relationship here is largely based on surface appearances and is not particularly fulfilling. Again, she decides to leave.
The chapter that follows this one details a succession of possible lives that Nora experiences. In one life she is a best-selling novelist. In another she is an architect who pioneers a style of eco-friendly building designs. In another, she is a photography editor for National Geographic. As she travels through these many lives, she starts to feel detached from herself. She tells Hugo this in one life, but he dismisses her concern, saying that the journey between these timelines is enjoyable and fun.
She returns to the library and discovers that it is dark. Mrs. Elm informs her that this may be the result of her becoming somewhat lost after all of this traveling. She remarks that the original goal of Nora's travel was to figure out how to live her life differently. But by jumping around from place to place so much, she has begun to lose herself, according to Mrs. Elm. She thinks over her regrets and revisits her memory of Ash, remembering his kindness the day her cat died.
Analysis
When Nora imagines her life working at an animal shelter, she labels it her "gentle" life, as she thinks of it as a life that is filled with kindness and compassion. Her description ends up being fairly accurate, as her job involves a great deal of caring for dogs and her boyfriend is extremely thoughtful. She ultimately decides that this is not the life she wants, as she thinks that the Nora that chose it deserves to be happy in it. Still, she recognizes the value of kindness in this life and it brings her closer to seeking out her "perfect" life. This "gentle" life allows Nora to recognize the value of small acts of compassion and realize that not every alternative life needs to involve a major divergence from her "root" life.
In the chapter titled "The Many Lives of Nora Seed," the reader learns about the plethora of lives that Nora travels through. Some present minor alterations to her current circumstances, while others offer an almost entirely changed vision of it. In presenting such a detailed list of Nora's alternative lives, Haig seems to posit the overwhelming number of possible branches that extend from everyday decisions. In a similar manner to Nora's conversation with Hugo, this chapter lays out the multitude of possibilities that the library contains.
Romantic love is also revisited as a main theme in this chapter. In her life as the owner of a vineyard, she is married to a winemaker and they seem to live a happy life. Still, she comes to find that most of this happiness is superficial. She is unable to carry on a meaningful conversation with her husband and he seems unconcerned when she says she wants to be alone for a little while. Like the section discussing her relationship with Ryan Murphy, this part of the book deals with the way in which a romantic idea—living out a life described on a wine label—is often more fraught when it becomes a reality.
The end of this section also returns to the idea of kindness, as Nora remembers the moment when Ash told her her cat had died. She considers the kindness in his face that she overlooked, as she was overcome with grief. This leads her to wonder what life might have been like had she gone on a date with Ash. This consideration results in her taking Mrs. Elm's advice and choosing a life that only slightly diverges from her main one. In this way, the book frames kindness as an important virtue in Nora's world, one with the potential to permanently alter the course of her life.
This section of the book represents a turning point for Nora. After going through an astounding number of different lives, Nora begins to feel detached from herself. Unsure of what she wants, she becomes more and more adrift in the wide range of possibilities that the library presents. Only when she starts to think about exploring smaller alterations to her original life does she recall Ash's kindness on the day her cat died. This leads her to travel to the life of the greatest consequence in her whole journey.
