Was I really alone in being occasionally subject to such absentmindedness, the kind that might not actually lead us to be indifferent to other people’s lives and deaths, but possibly, if I can put it this way, to a failure to accord them due weight, which is simply the weight of reality? What she called absentmindedness seemed to me so unremarkable, so common, and so universal – indeed the basis of everyday life – that one could only conclude that all of us are monsters, that is to say, none of us is.
