Seeing the march of news reports about the aftermaths of Myanmar’s cyclone and China’s earthquake, and the ever-mounting death toll figures, awful yet abstract in their largeness (currently: Myanmar: 32,000; China: 10,000), I keep hearing Annie Dillard’s grim challenge from For the Time Being: “Where were you when you first heard the astounding, heartbreaking news? … Did your anguish last days or weeks?”

The astounding, heartbreaking news she refers to is the cyclone whose waves drowned 138,000 Bangladeshi people on Tuesday, 30 April 1991. The essayistic narrative of For the Time Being returns a number of times to this figure, this unvisualizable 138,000:

At dinner I mentioned to our daughter, who was then seven years old, that it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.

“No, it’s easy,” she said. “Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.”

Later in the book, Dillard writes: “Anyone’s close world of family and friends comprises a group smaller than almost all sampling errors, smaller than almost all rounding errors, an invisible group at whose loss the world will not blink.” She reels off a few of recent history’s death toll statistics: the many football stadiums’ worth of deaths caused in a year by Joseph Stalin, by Pol Pot, by the 1917-1918 flu epidemic, by measles even today. “Do we blink?”

The paleontologist suffered, he said, the sense of being “an atom lost in the universe.” Individuals blur. Journalists use the term “compassion fatigue.” What Ernest Becker called the denial of death is a kind of reality fatigue. Do you suffer this? At what number do other individuals blur for me? Vanish? Our tolerances, I think, vary not only with culture but with age; children rarely grieve for strangers — “lots and lots of dots, in blue water.”