Carl Franzon

First line: ”Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition”

Last line: ”A caterpillar disappears into its silk-wrapped cocoon, and things go dark and then…”

You can’t read The Comfort Book just like any other book. Even Matt Haig states in the opening “notes on structure” that this book is “as messy as life itself”. It’s basically a collection of wisdom that can be read consecutively, or just by flipping through the book randomly and reading whichever one lands on.

Sometimes, the nuggets close to each other seem to share common themes, so I found it helpful to read at least the adjacent ones together.

I enjoy Haig’s writing. I love his stories, and even though this book is not a story, I can recognise his writing even in this book.

Whenever I’ve felt down or things have felt hopeless, I’ve always found hope in reading a few of these wisdoms. Sometimes, that is all you need, just to get some perspective, and someone “telling” you that things may look bad from your point of view, but with a different perspective, even the worst things can suddenly look hopeful.

A lot of self-help books fall into a trap of just ending up sounding like a collection of instagram quotes, but this book manages to steer away from this with grace. A lot of this is because many nuggets are written from the voice of Haig himself, almost talking, I think.

I would recommend this book to anyone needing a boost of hope, and I will keep it close at hand, comforted in knowing that I can pick it up when things feel dark, and I need to shift my perspectives.

Favorite passages:

“We all have an impact on each other. We are all connected in so many seen and unseen ways. Which possible explains why one of the simplest and quickest routes to happiness seems to be to make someone else happy. The reason to be selfless is selfish. Nothing makes ourselves feel better that not thinging of our selves.” (p.52)

“Life is understood backward; but it must be lived forward” (Søren Kierkegaard) (p.64)

“There is no point spending your entire life trying to win the love you didn’t feel when you needed it. You sometimes just have to let go of an old story and start your own. Give yourself some love. You can’t change the past. You can’t change other people. You can change you though. You narrate this story. So start to write a new chapter.” (p.66)

“Experience one beautiful thing a day. However small. However trivial. Read a poem. Play a favorite song. Laugh with a friend. Gaze at the sky just before the sun’s final tumble toward night. Watch a classic movie. Eat a slice of lemon drizzle cake. Whatever. Just give yourself one simple reminder that the world is full of wonders. Even if we are at a point in life where we can’t appreciate things, it sometimes helps to remember there are things in this world to enjoy, when we are ready.” (p.79)

“We grow through hard times. Growth is change. And when everything is easy, we have no reason to change. The most painful moments in life expand us. And when the pain leaves, space remains. Space we can fill with life itself.” (p.80)

“Loneliness isn’t an absence of company. Loneliness is felt when we are lost. But we can be lost right in the middle of a crowd. There is nothing lonelier than being with people who aren’t on your wavelength. The cure for loneliness isn’t more people. The cure for loneliness is understanding who we are.” (p.185)

“You don’t have to cope with everything. You don’t have to handle everything. You don’t have to keep a lid on every-thing to get through a day.

You can’t turn tides. You can’t defy gravity. You can’t go against the grain without getting splinters.

But you can drop the disguise. You can feel what you feel. You can stretch out inside yourself.

You can cry. You can feel. You can show what you are.

You can, in fact, be you.” (p.196)

First line: ”I am old.”

Last line: ”The future is you.”

Time is a tantalizing and utterly fascinating concept. An ever present concept constantly affecting us, but still so elusive to our understanding of its constituents.

Traveling in time is a recurring theme in many books and movies. This book is not like those.

How to Stop Time explores more the intricacies of eternal life. At first glance, it may seem tempting, as I think most of us in periods experience a fear of dying, and stress that life is too short. Maybe there are so many things we would want to experience, or maybe we want to be able to explore different life choices to see where they would have led us.

Tom Hazard, in the book, as an ”alba”, does age, just at a very slow rate. Born in the 16th century, he has seen it all, and lived through some of the most defining moments of humanity’s development.

As a story, the book reminds me of both Forrest Gump, Benjamin Button and Sophie’s World, but the story is not what keeps me reading. It’s how Haig so smoothly weaves in little lessons of philosophy and strategically places small intellectual challenges regarding life, age, death, time and love throughout the story.

We not only follow Tom back and forth from his experiences of living in over four different centuries, as well as present time. We also get to feel his struggles, the fear of being ”different”, the pain of outliving people he loves and trying to find a meaning in an existence where everyone else’s full lives are nothing but fleeting moments for him.

I think a pretty good way of defining a ”good book” is how long it stays in your mind after reading it. I have a feeling this will turn out to be a very good book.

Favorite passages:

”You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Don’t hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.” (p.126)

”…I was starting to feel that you couldn’t do mathematics with emotions. In protecting yourself from hurt you could create a new, subtler type of pain. It is a dilemma.” (p.132)

”The human mind has is its own…prisons. You don’t have a choice over everything in life.” (p.152)

”I have only been alive for four hundred and thirty- nine years, which is of course nowhere near long enough to understand the minimal facial expressions of the average teenage boy.” (p.173)

”Free will might be overrated. ’Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of of the nineteenth century, ’is the dizziness of freedom.’ (p.233)

”Love is where you find the meaning…You can take all the years before and since and weigh them next to those, and they wouldn’t stand a chance.” (p.296)

”That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days - some years - some decades - are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.” (p.296)

“And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do? If I could be kind without the fear of being fucked over? If I could love without fear of being hurt? If I could taste the sweetness of today without thinking of how I will miss that taste tomorrow? If I could not fear the passing of time and the people it will steal? Yes. What would I do? Who would I care for? What battle would I fight? Which paths would I step down? What joys would I allow myself? What internal mysteries would I solve? How, in short, would I live?

So, it took me only 437 years, but I finally realised how to go about answering all this. I didn’t quite know what the answer was but I knew the process. In a way the process was not knowing the answer, and being fine with that.” (p.314)

”’Love is a motherfucker.’

I sigh. ’Of course it is.’

’You should just shoot for it. Tell her you messed up. Tell her why you messed up. Be honest. Honesty works. Well, honesty gets you locked up in a psych ward. But sometimes it works.’

’Honesty is a motherfucker,’ I say, and she laughs.

She goes quiet for a little while. Remembers something. ’I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.’” (p.317)

”History was - is - a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don’t always have to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.” (p.321)

”I love her so much. I could not love her more. And the terror of not allowing myself to love her has beaten that fear of losing her.” (p.325)

”There is only the present. Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other…

It is clear. In those moments that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be?

The future is you.” (p.325)

Opening line: ”On a September morning, the kind of equatorial summer day where the air is thick with the threat of rain and your clothes stick to your skin by nine o’ clock, Ian Koli is waiting for me outside Connie’s Coffee Corner, a busy cafe in the Kibera neighborhood of Nairobi, Kenya."

Ending line: ”They smiled as we climbed. ’It means many, many steps.’”

Recommending a book is good, and something we do when we’ve read a book we enjoyed. But how do we go about when we read a book that feels so important we want to make sure other people read it?! A simple recommendation is not enough. We should invent a ”must-read” card we can invoke that forces other people to read the book we invoke it on. I would have used my card on this book.

Even if I think the book is not the best literary piece I’ve read, and sometimes a bit too flourished in its language, the points it’s hitting and the perspectives it casts has stuck in my mind forever.

With the prevalence of AI in our western society it’s easy to just run along in order to not be left behind, without noticing the risk of not seeing where we are heading. Murgia gives an extensive and detailed insight into the darker sides of AI, the areas we don’t see, don’t know about and just maybe don’t really want to know about. Going forward, I don’t really know how I will be able to use AI without being reminded of the conditions of the data-workers doing the dirty work that enables the models to run.

Favorite passage:

”He acknowledged why people may start to prefer speaking to AI systems rather than to one another. ’I get it, interacting with people, it’s hard. It’s tough. It demands a lot, it is often unrewarding,’ he said.

But he feels that modern life has left people stranded on their own desert islands, leaving them yearning for companionship. ’So now because of this, there is a market for volleyballs,’ he said. ’Social chatbots, they could provide comfort, real solace to people in the same way that Wilson provides.’

But ultimately, what makes our lives meaningful is the empathy and intent we get from human interactions - people responding to one another. With AI, he said, ’It feels like there’s someone on the other end. But there isn’t.’” (p.261)